The general public may not know this, but poets are a dangerous and vulnerable new population in our cities. According to Statistics Canada, over 30 per cent of all homicides last year occurred at or around poetry events. New poets are jumped into the culture through a brutal ritual known as “open mic.” But the only way to leave poetry is either by being found dead in the trunk of car or, for the lucky few, through something called “tenure.” Some blame the government for coddling poets with handouts, or “gee-gees” in poet argot. (Usage: “Hey man, I got hooked up with a gee-gee this year.”) Others say the government isn’t doing enough, and that alienation from mainstream society is causing poets to resort to violent blogging. Regardless of reasons, by reviewing three poetry books, I again risk my life….

Alfred Hitchcock’s dream film project was a freeform narrative about one night in New York, starting with an establishing shot of a drunken penthouse party and ending with a close-up of a fly on a passed-out Bowery wino’s glass. Nic Labriola approaches something like this structure in his Naming the Mannequins (Insomniac Press, 65 pages, $19.95; •••), though the city in his poems remains nameless. Labriola can turn a great line (“Mannequin girls don’t give a damn about Mozart”) and his language is only sometimes just shy of needed madcap levels to pull off his conceit about one night in the lives of wastrels, boxers and mannequin-obsessed night watchmen. Though I do wonder if real night watchmen will soon start protesting their consistent representation in the media as doll-obsessed goldbrickers?

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk writes unapologetically confessional poetry about breakups and bad vegan food and also dares to take on the nearly extinct (in Canada at least) political poem. Raw and candid is her default setting in Somewhere to Run From (Tightrope Books, 102 pages, $14.95; •••) but her longer and more complex works show that she can work a narrative with insight, as in “Dolphin Poetry” (I had a heart — hard like a horse’s / a pony on a locket / weak teeth / nothing you ever wanted) or in the from-out-of-nowhere Sinatra inspired “Through the Night” (“We’re all getting old / Maybe this is what lube is for. ”)

Talking Masks by Adam Seelig (Bookthug, 75 pages, $15; ••••) may not even be poetry per se — it bills itself as a dramatic score for a performance — but I’m including it here because it works as such. Just consider it poetry with instructions. Riffing on Sophocles’ biggest hit, Seelig’s new book (subtitled “Oedipussy”) uses strident debate and bawdy humour to take on the idea of character. His source material is classical and his formal concerns are dyed-in-the-wool modernism, but his swagger is old-fashioned postmodern. No, I’m not joking. I really meant for that sentence to happen. Seelig isn’t joking either.