The latest news and notes from those inky fellows at Gaspereau Press, with sundry accounts of their authors’ exploits and their books’ reception out in the wide world.
Moving Shop
With Keagan Hawthorne taking ownership of Gaspereau Press at the end of 2025, the last of the books, presses and equipment headed to the new location in Sackville, New Brunswick has completed its journey. Checkout the book slide we built along the way:
New Website!
Check out the press’s new website. The website is currently a work in progress, with additional refinements coming through January, but you can browse books and authors, order directly on the website, and more.
Follow Us!
Make sure you follow the press on Instagram and Bluesky.
New Releases!
It’s been a while since we last talked, so here are some of the books the press has published published recently. Find these titles for purchase on the new Gaspereau Press website and in your local bookstore:
I Could See it Spoken by Harry Thurston
I Could See It Spoken brings together Harry Thurston’s two earliest poetry collections, barefaced stone (1980) and Clouds Flying Before the Eye (1985), as well as previously uncollected poems written between 1969 and 1985. In surveying this body of work, spanning the years from fledgling youth to middle-age, the reader tracks the evolution of a writer’s preoccupation with the subject of time—historical, ancestral, seasonal and personal—and the development of one of the most iconic voices to come out of the Atlantic region in a generation.
Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos by Alexander Hollenberg
In Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos, Alexander Hollenberg explores the way in which poetry straddles the divide between the meaning-making impulse of the constructed human world and the wilder, wily resistance of the seemingly vulnerable non-human world. Plainspoken, alert, Hollenberg’s poems work recursively, repurposing words, images and motifs in new contexts in order to celebrate the richness and risks of storytelling.
In Overlays, Sean Howard employs experimental, magpie strategies that draw fresh poems from the deep wells of two related texts—John Thompson’s influential poetry collection Stilt Jack (1978) and Peter Sanger’s Sea Run (2023), a critical commentary on Thompson’s mesmerically allusive and elusive ghazals. By mixing images and diction from these source texts with his own reserve of memories, dreams and associations, Howard opens a fresh, lucidly turbulent correspondence between literary elements, the shapes, sounds and silences of his poems creating a palimpsest score.
The poems in Nightjar form a triptych vision of the way humans both experience and alter the natural world as we pass through it. Straddling between subalpine vistas and the brooks and bowers of the Acadian forest, Rice engages binaries of landscape and human history, loss and gain, the seen and unseen, and direction and distance, her movement between the sublime and the intimate stirring unexpected forces that pull us toward “the empty space where the mountain has fallen.”
A Carpentry of Words and Wood by John Terpstra
I have to put out of my mind what is happening to the trees of the forest in order to do what I do, writes John Terpstra at the opening of this memoir, because his lifelong creative pursuits of carpentry, furniture building and writing books—occupations consumptive of lumber and paper—necessitate a certain amount of sylvan destruction. With his episodic prose style and dogged curiosity, Terpstra considers the many facets of his complex relationship with trees and timber, all while recounting the story of his evolution as a craftsperson. In weighing the similarities and differences between carpentry and creative writing and the bittersweetness of his transition into retirement, Terpstra discovers that the trees have a canopy of lessons to teach us about being.
Sue Goyette’s poem Future Howl plots a fulsome radius of the experience of trauma and survival, one that encompasses much about living in the aftermath that skirts straightforward description and yet works in the frequency of courage and joy. Propelled by Goyette’s declarative voice, sense of humour and side-slipping imagery, each page of the poem is “a microdose of ars poetica” infused with intertextual and transformative guidance from the painter Bob Ross, the live-cam company of a pair of endangered red wolves, and a private-to-public reckoning that is grounded in this singular time.
Metadata from a Changing Climate by Ian LeTourneau
Metadata from a Changing Climate offers a poetics of entanglement, where the world of the poem is at once estranged and inseparable from the landscape and phenomena of the world it chronicles. Leveraging his imagination against the particulars of New Brunswick’s Saint John River valley—from porcupines and chickadees to the Reversing Falls— Ian LeTourneau writes poems whose clarity and insight remind us what’s possible when we allow form, language and ideas to test themselves against the strain of ever-shifting forces in our pursuit of connection and meaning.
Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender
The larger-than-life characters and stories that tumble out of Come One Thing Another assert the experiences of generations of Lavenders and Roys as a kind of rural epic, transposing ordinary occurrences into the ageless framework of myth and its preoccupation with metamorphosis—with shifting identities and values and the persistent transformations of people and places. Colloquial, humourous, exuberant, shot through with reverie, these poems are carefully-crafted oratory, love songs for a vibrant heritage.
Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”
During the 2023 Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose, Andrew Steeves invited authors Jim Johnstone, Christopher Patton, and Klara du Plessis to discuss the state of contemporary literary criticism and curation. This book presents an edited transcript of their illuminating conversation. Its publication also marks the final Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose held in Kentville, Nova Scotia, with a brief account of 24-year’s-worth of speakers, readers, and guest artists who participated in this unique cultural event.
Tonya Lailey’s Farm: Lot 23 explores the complex relationship we have with land, particularly as it relates to agriculture. Her poems depict the spectrum of human experience that plays out on the stage of the family farm—love, desperation, triumph, folly, caution, greed—and the real impacts that technology, economics and shifting cultural values have on both the people and the land. Lailey reminds us that the fates of culture and agriculture are inseparable, that “the purpose / of a farm / of a poem / has always been / the living in it.”
Upcoming Releases
Watch this spring for new poetry collections from new and familiar faces.
This newsletter will continue on a roughly monthly basis, with a quick roundup of author news and more. Best wishes for 2026!
This post first appeared in our Substack newsletter.
