On Occasion: Poems for the People

by Sina Queyras (Editor)

A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.

On Occasion is a collection rooted in the tradition of the poem as an act of love, an act of protest, an act of visionary incantation, of remembrance, of a call to arms, and a much-needed balm. 

The traditional ‘occasional poem’ has a bad a tedious rhyming poem at a wedding or a dreary verse at a funeral. This is not that. These are poems for a tumultuous and complicated world, for occasions that may be celebrations or mournings, or anything in between; from life cycles, to earth cycles, to social cycles, editor Sina Queyras brings together a collection of poetry that speaks to moments of upheaval, revolution, and challenge. Poetry that people can turn to.

272 pages, Paperback

Published May 12, 2026

About the author

Sina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

Reviews

[Kevin Stebner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly a biased review (as yours truly has a poem within), but unlike most hodge-podge anthologies I encounter, this is a surprisingly cohesive anthology. The contents run a wide range, both stylistically (a welcome batch of concrete poetry for instance) and subject matter - the book is broken into sections a for different types of "occasions": deaths, protests, mundane moments... There's something about the spontaneity a lot of these poems, written for the occasion, poems that feel active, not edited into submission, that feel active. And the roughness and the nowness, the same thing that works for a good album, documentation and getting an idea out while it's there - putting it down, and that's the important thing. While there's a focus on Canadian content (personally, I found there were some stunners from Gary Barwin), but that cancon that's not a strict rule here either - Queyras curates far and wide with skill. Even those poems written well before this publication, and those written just for this, one can read the absolute care that went into the edit and sequencing of these poems. They speak to each other, and in a feat that rarely happens, this is an anthology with cohesion and reads with flow.