From Toronto's poet laureate (2012–15) comes a new book that is a tour de force in confessional verse. This autobiographical sequence in 980 lines contains 70 stanzas of “skeletal sonnets” composed, astonishingly, in one day and one evening. Traverse is a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses, a great burst of imaginative energy and aesthetic reflection that celebrates a 30-year period of Clarke's writing poetry.

By all accounts, the bludgeoning murder in 1949 of a taxi driver by brothers George and Rufus Hamilton was a slug-ugly" crime. George and Rue were hanged for it. Repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins'deeds, George Elliott Clarke uncovered a story of violence, poverty and shame -- a story that led first to the Governor General's Award– winning Execution Poems and culminated in Clarke's brilliant and darkly comic debut novel. Named an editor's choice by The Bookseller in the UK, George & Rue is a book about death that brims with fierce vitality and the sensual, rhythmic beauty that so often defines Clarke's writing.

Just start your engine. Go.Carl Black is an intellectual and artist, a traveller, a reader and an unapologetic womanizer. A motorcyclist. He burns for the bohemian life, but is trapped in a railway porter's prosaic—at times humiliating—existence. Taking place over one dramatic year in Halifax, Nova Scotia, The Motorcyclist vividly recounts Carl's travels and romantic exploits as he tours the backroads of the east coast and the bedrooms of a series of beautiful women. Inspired by the life of George Elliott Clarke's father, the novel tells the story of a black working-class man caught between the expectations of his times and gleaming possibilities of the open road.In vibrant, energetic, sensual prose, George Elliott Clarke brilliantly illuminates the life of a young black man striving for pleasure, success and, most of all, respect.