Vancouver-based poet Elizabeth Bachinsky got in touch with her Ukrainian heritage with her new book, God of Missed Connections (Nightwood Editions).

"I'm third generation Vancouver and we're pretty closed off from that culture," she says.

"It's a really good vantage point," she adds. "I never tried the superficial stuff like dancing or food. That's the stuff I wanted to get past. You have to take those kitschy qualities and transform them. It's about taking Ukrainian culture into the post-modern. It's hard to do but not impossible.

"Ukrainians are deadly sexy."

The poems cover Bachinsky's family history and Stephen Leacock's casual racism, Canadian internment camps and forced starvation in the old country. The Bread Basket of Europe gives new, terrifying meaning to a cliché I often heard growing up. She makes poignant use of the word Holodomor (or "murder by hunger," referring to the millions who staved to death under Stalin).

"I get corrected all the time after readings," she says. "I like to be corrected. It means to me that things aren't getting through the way they should. It's the nuances that get missed, not the big historical facts. Which are the story, but not the whole story."

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Metis writer and activist Gregory Scofield is at that stage in his career when a retrospective seems timely. His new book, Kipocihkan (Nightwood Editions), is comprised of selections from his five previous poetry collections and some new work.

The title is a Cree word referring to someone unable to speak. Scofield told Uptown how the title came to him.

"For months before I got the collection together, thinking about it, I would wake up repeating the word," he says. "I knew I had heard it but I had a hard time remembering what the word meant.

"It's a slang word. It's made up of two words, to shut and obstruction. I knew it was exactly the word for the title, a sense of being silenced, of being mute. There was a spiritual reason why the word stayed with me."

Much of Scofield's writing examines First Nations experience. He makes use of both very personal history and some pretty pointed humour.

"I think humour is a wonderful tool for First Nations and Metis storytelling, especially for stories that are difficult to tell," he says. "Humour is able to disarm people. As storytellers, we need to be able to poke fun. To call on our own personal tricksters."