Forage By Rita Wong. Nightwood Editions, 85 pp, $16.95

By John Newlove

McGimpsey dredges up every TV reference you’ve ever forgotten, and spins them into a Hawaii Five-O libretto immune to limitations of form, content, or even just good taste

By Gary Geddes. Goose Lane Editions, 127 pp, $19.95, softcover

The everyday is the new black of contemporary poetry. The personal, the domestic, and the banal are no longer boring chatter but subject to a cultural articulation: the lingual equivalent of finding a great shirt at the back of your closet and having everyone say you look really cool in it.

with photos by Karen Moe. Anvil Press, 117 pp, $16, softcover.

By Roy Miki. New Star Books, 96 pp, $21, softcover.

First-time novelist and well-known Victoria bookseller Robert Wiersema manages this character-centred narrative adeptly enough to keep you reading through what is clearly any parent's worst nightmare.

Sometimes a book is funny or intriguing or mysterious, but every once in a while one asks you to notice how you think, changes the way your brain functions. Sometimes a book is all those things at once.

The mantra “The personal is political” manifests itself in the work of four poets who examine the effects of the way we live our life.

The Porcupine's Quill, 93 pp, $16.95, softcover.

This was a momentous year for the Vancouver International Writers Festival, and not only because it marked the final October for founding artistic director Alma Lee. After 18 years leading the weeklong celebration, Lee handed the pencil sharpener over to former CBC Radio One host Hal Wake. Amid all the farewells and encomiums, though, the festival had another absence to cope with: a drop in attendance due to the B.C. Teachers' Federation strike.

By Matt Rader. Nightwood Editions, 80 pp, $16.95, softcover.

Gaspereau Press, $18.95, 73 pp, softcover.

Polestar Book Publishers, 112 pp, $18.95, softcover.

Nightwood Editions, 81 pp, $15, softcover.

Knopf Canada, 319 pp, $29.95, hardcover.

TalonBooks, 192 pp, $17.95, softcover.

The following comes from the prologue to Daniel Francis's biography of Louis Denison Taylor (1857­1946), Vancouver's longest-serving mayor. On October 19, Mayor Larry Campbell presented Francis with the 2004 City of Vancouver Book Award.

The collected poems of Sina Queyras's Teethmarks (Nightwood Editions, $16) sprawl across the space of the book like clothes scattered across the floor of a messy room. You can enter, pick something up, hold it up to your chest, and see if you like it. Queyras welcomes you into the room of a poem where "on aubergine linen we lounge, full/prow and longing for something hard/and easy: palm on palm we/are dreaming each other in leather". She asks you to make yourself comfortable.

Anvil Press, 92 pp, $16, softcover.

Little, Brown and Company, 272 pp, $36.95, hardcover.

The credits for Blue Crush hadn't finished rolling before a need crashed over me to hightail it over to Tofino to surf some pipe. Turning the last page of Montreal veteran author Mary Soderstrom's After Surfing Ocean Beach, however, didn't evoke such sensual urges. The novel is more clinical than picturesque. This is a thoughtful book, one with a mysterious plot and a dramatic twist. Perfect reading for any beach.

McClelland & Stewart, 211 pp, $19.95, softcover.

New Star Books, 87 pp, $16, softcover.

Thistledown, 80 pp, $12.95, softcover.