Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's new selection of Canada's finest young poets.
Nine years ago the first volume of
Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada's finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in schools and universities across the country. And the poets within, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Tim Bowling, Stephanie Bolster, Michael Crummey, Evelyn Lau, Sue Goyette and Carmine Starnino, have gone on to develop and captivate wide readerships of their own.
Today a new and exciting generation of poets has come of age. Some, including Tammy Armstrong, Adam Dickinson, George Murray, Alison Pick, Shane Rhodes, matt robinson, Laisha Rosnau and Nathalie Stephens, have already put out books, and have even won or been shortlisted for major awards. Others with work just as compelling will be introduced for the first time.
Breathing Fire 2 collects the best from all 33 of these writers, proudly presenting the next generation of Canada's poets to the world.
Canada's best new poets, as selected by Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier.
Crozier and Lane write their intro in celebration, excitement, and gratitude for the good poems they found. For that, and for all their time and attention, they deserve praise ... [T]he book can give you hours of intense reading engagement and coax you to search for books you might have taken much longer to discover, or never discovered. A decade or two from now ...
Breathing Fire 2 is likely to be ... a historical time-capsule.
--Brian Bartlett, The Malahat Review 
