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Bright Machine
  • Published: 17 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9780771019951
  • Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Bright Machine

Poetry

Formats & editions
Hardback
17 Nov 2026
EBook
13 Oct 2026
Audiobook
13 Oct 2026
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From critically acclaimed and internationally celebrated poet Canisia Lubrin comes her highly anticipated new collection, Bright Machine.

This profoundly engaged, boldly formed long suite poem probes the legacy of human intelligence put in service of ruin. The rhythm of Morse Code drives the poem’s haunting music as Lubrin records the effects of warcraft on times of peril and possibility for human cohabitation. The result is a book of chimeric monologues in an invented form Lubrin calls the tesseract—a poem of sixteen lines of fragmented music, shaped by the logic of the mathematical cube—four stanzas growing from the quatrain, each increased by one line until the final one-line stanza.

The poet addresses the myth of the developed world’s heirs, casualties, and its wing of weapons that guarantee(d) the successes of empires. Bright Machine reckons with the saga of civilization as the story of arms history—and its emissaries’ expansive appetites for recasting conquest and mass killing—in heartening, urgent poetry for a turbulent world.
  • Published: 17 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9780771019951
  • Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Canisia Lubrin

CANISIA LUBRIN’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Governor General's Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and the Globe and Mail named her Poet of the Year. Code Noir: Metamorphoses is her debut fiction, and includes stories listed for the Journey Prize (2019, 2020), Toronto Book Award (2018) and the Shirley Jackson Award (2021). Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
portrait photo of Canisia Lubrin

Also by Canisia Lubrin

Sound--At the Interregnum
The Dyzgraphxst
See all

Praise for Bright Machine

Praise for The World After Rain:

  • “How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.” —Dionne Brand
  • “Epic. . . . The World After Rain expands our understanding of what elegy can accomplish, demonstrating how personal grief can open onto larger questions of history, diaspora, and survival. In an era when poetry often struggles to address collective trauma, Lubrin offers a model for how the intimate and the political can illuminate each other.” —The Fiddlehead