terminal 1: Arrivals

The Loon Poems, a limited edition chapbbook, is Vera Lake’s first publication.

Typeset in Clarendon, 30 copies were printed on Zephyr paper and hand-stitched in Windsor, Ontario in September 2025.

Edited by Joseph LaBine

Architect, Dubliner, artist, and autodidact Niall Montgomery was also a poet. terminal 1: Arrivals is the first selection of Montgomery’s poetry to appear in book form. Uncompromising in their polyvocality and rejection of censorship, Montgomery's long poems were a remarkable success in modernist circles and represent a watershed moment in the history of twentieth-century Irish verse. The striking pops and bangs of his jazz-infused poetry anticipate elements of the Beats and sound installations by later twentieth-century avant-garde artists. This volume collects early pieces that blazed their way into the little magazines of the 1930s and '40s but have yet to receive proper critical appreciation.

250 copies of Phil Hall's My Banjo & Tiny Drawings were printed and bound into black cloth boards. The cover art is by Stuart Kinmond.

Third prize winner of the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design, 2015.

L297 is a movingly elegiac set of stories. Memories preceding a trip to a wilderness program for adolescents recur like dreams, or nightmares: travellers arrive for a funeral; a family crashes a car; a teenager sneaks out of the house to get high; friends meet at a bar; a boy remembers the broken bones of childhood. The narrative, always more situation than premise, forms an oblique background to the highly poetic prose. The many obsessions of addiction find expression in these vignettes. They attest to love in small details, whether exploitative, familial, romantic or spatial. Rooms and architecture have just as much importance as people. LaBine’s style is as at ease in cities as in the woods, and with Medieval English as ‘May-day’ telegrams. Whatever its influences and inflections, L297 demands the reader’s attention.

Andre Narbonne’s first poetry collection, You Were Here (Flat Singles Press), paints in vivid language the felt-reality of childhood. According to Tom Wayman, “André Narbonne deploys an austere precision of imagery that depicts in the sharpest possible focus his poems’ scenes, incidents and characters: ‘a blue balloon . . . / . . . tumbles tentatively on the beach in search of a lost child’ or a house lawn reveals ‘the commonplace litter of a distracted family.’ In both lineated and prose poems, Narbonne provides an unflinching look a rural Ontario childhood.”

Second prize winner of the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design, 2016.