Poetry Books

Book SynopsisMark Laba's second full-length poetry collection - and his first in seventeen years - recreates the structure of the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child. Much of the imagery plays across the broad spectrum of these popular cultural tropes, albeit many lost or forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader will find a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation, all rooted in a veritable grab-bag of far-ranging influences. Laba draws on everything from gritty pulp fiction to Borscht Belt humour, from dime-store ventriloquism to twelve-cent comic books (the long poem "Tolstoy's Leech Farm" is riddled with Laba's own comic drawings). He hurls these surprising and sometimes shocking vaudeville narratives from the peak of the Jewish Alps, and even his most extreme language experiments entertain. Some may call these surreal poems literary atrocities while others hail them as lyricism for an impossible century, but if Mark Laba didn't write these poems, no one else would.

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Book SynopsisLow Centre of Gravity finds Michael Dennis in familiar territory. You'll laugh. You'll cry. Dennis' poems continue to be the narratives of movies you'd like to someday see. These poems ask the questions you'd really like answered, sauntering into the room and staking claim. The story-telling continues, the good, the bad and the sadly tragic. With Low Centre of Gravity Dennis remains "direct, curious, pissed off and honest".

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Mouthfuls of Space offer a dissociative journey through the life of a once homeless recovering drug addict and victim of childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. Tom Prime's debut solo collection was written under the haze of antipsychotics later discovered to have caused many of his symptoms. His hypnotic, surreal voice reveals his transition from the street into the low-paying menial labour of factory work. There is beauty here too, and deeply dark comedy: a sprite-like being imagines his hallucinations as a deeper reality, where indescribable creatures coexist with "hyenas dressed as real estate agents" and those who march in "the skeleton parade." Mouthfuls of Space explores trauma and the dehumanizing enterprise of factory work with sensitivity but also desperation. The voice in these poems struggles to breathe but finds a certain comfort in "the mother-shadow of trees, the old light of vibrating stars."

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Book SynopsisScofflaw is a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations amid globalized pressures. For the most part, the poem is a lyrical dialectic flowing between a shadowy figure known as Scofflaw and an enigmatic "we." The content ranges from the effect of pesticides on Manitoba butterflies to the reworking of a John Newlove poem on Indigenous peoples to Native remains beneath the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The text culminates in a "lexicon standoff," where Scofflaw uses metaphysical means to avoid a character assassination, battling against the culling of words from the language.

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Book SynopsisBOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over both familiar and unexplored landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from 20 years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, BOLT investigates rough terrain and long horizons. A compilation of poetry, performance scores, and autobiography, it is full of voices, places, fleeting encounters, animals, busted hearts, machinery, and extreme weather. Delicate portraits of birds muscle in on experimental scripts. Buffalo thunder through the text. Lovers are left weeping, factory stacks rear up against boiling skies, and coal trains thread silently through clouds of fugitive dust. It is a collection of scars and a compendium of remedies. BOLT is a measurement of lightening. But it's also a carefully engineered fastener that holds things together. It's the familiar impulse that occasionally seizes us all, to suddenly run, out of control.

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Book SynopsisReckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness. We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us. They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness and in song. Here is a master poet taking stock in later years. Adrift and grounded, lost in memories that are alive in the present and also lost to history, the artist's mind cannot help but speculate and wonder about the navigation of it all. How does one chart the course? How did one chart the course? And what was discovered along the way? Joy, awe, grief, loss, wonder . . . "disappearing into the mind of the dream, / that opening," and now all rolled into one ball of what, wisdom? "what was my early life, banging away at that padlocked gate? . . . is this where the return begins? starting over in old age, body falling apart according to plan, and no blossoming wisdom, kneeling on the muddy riverbank, thirsty once again for mind, . . . and when the brain falters the stories skew once more into something unfamiliar, something from long before you, and those pieces won't be put together again, not ever, will they?" What connects us with the past?&nbspMemory and story.&nbspEach fragment a part of the whole. Without it we exist in isolation.&nbspFriesen's deep and careful observations make Reckoning both intensely personal and universal.

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Book Synopsis"A town is a tin of children in an ocean," writes Anna van Valkenburg in her debut poetry collection, Queen and Carcass, a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht's maxim "Do not fear death so much as an inadequate life" as a touchstone. At once ecstatic, meditative, and grotesque, the poems in Queen and Carcass confront some of the most fundamental existential questions.

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Book SynopsisIn language that twists together hobo slang and flights of troubadourish diction, Hearts Amok scrutinizes the history of the love sonnet in Surrey, England and simultaneously celebrates the tickings and tollings of one love-struck heart in Surrey, British Columbia. In the words of Chelene Knight: "Kevin Spenst's Hearts Amok will shake you to your core. Everyday questions of love are earned, won, lost and then ultimately answered through the whirlwind of constantly spinning verse." Examining the underpinnings of love, this book journeys from the Middle Ages to the present where Spenst dates his way through Vancouver to finally find the love of his life.

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Book SynopsisPineapple Express is Evelyn Lau's eighth collection of poetry.&nbspThe collection is rooted in the mind and its disorders.&nbspDepression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking have been explored widely in fiction and non-fiction, much less so in poetry. "Pineapple Express" explores moods, medications and side effects, capturing the flatness of depression while making the language sing. It also explores the notion of mid-life, in all its manifestations: physical changes, psychological upheaval, the notion of becoming "invisible," and mortality.

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Book SynopsisSid Mary is a voice to be reckoned with.Beloved for his intimate, lyrical poetry, Marty''s depiction of selfhood, connection to place and to landscape have proven him a unique and dissenting voice in Canadian literature as well as a consistent presence in the Canadian environmental movement. These are poems, often strongly resonant of western speech, that celebrate all the vicissitudes of rural life, the loves and losses, the valleys and peaks of life on the prairies, foothills and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.This first-ever collected works, featuring forward written by Kit Dobson and Owen Percy, and interview conducted by Pamela Banting, brings together old and new poems, published and unpublished works, in a celebration of the career and artistry of a Western Canadian icon.

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Book SynopsisA captivating search through one family''s history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Aftershocks and fragmented memories ricochet through this collection, bringing with them strength, intensity and uninhibited beauty. Recalling pivotal work by Billy-Ray Belcourt, jaye simpson, Joshua Whitehead and Emily Riddle, Sarain Frank Soonias makes his poetic debut with a splash that ripples far outside his own work, and marks the entrance of a new, important voice in contemporary poetry.

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Book SynopsisAt a crumbling zoo, an elephant keeper, a security guard, and a newly hired media consultant have differing views over what should be done about the zoo''s main attraction, the aging Sri Lankan elephant Matara. Matara is deteriorating by the day following the loss of her companion elephant Cheerio and a petition is circulating to try to force the zoo''s management to move her to a sanctuary. Karen, Matara''s keeper, argues adamantly that the zoo is Matara''s home and family, and that she is not strong enough to travel. Romney, the enthusiastic but increasingly stressed media consultant, thinks more about donations and galas than Matara''s life, while Marcel the security guard and an international graduate student struggling in the last stages of his thesis, understands the perspective of the protestors even as he seeks to protect the zoo''s employees.Weaving between the perspectives of public relations, zoos as unique spaces of human animal interaction, and the question of whether or not zoos should exist at all, Conni Massing''s latest play takes inspiration from real life debates that surround Lucy, the lone elephant at the Edmonton Valley Zoo, asking poignant questions about our relationships with animals, and the power dynamics and instability that surround them.elephant keeper, argues that the zoo is Matara''s home now, after so long away from the wild, and that the elephant is too weak to travel. Romney, the enthusiastic (and stressed) consultant, thinks more about donations and galas rather than Matara''s life, while Marcel the security guard empathizes with the protestors even as he must protect the zoo''s employees from increasingly volatile protests. Weaving between the perspectives of public relations, the importance of allowing humans to experience animal encounters as well as whether zoos should even exist at all, Conni Massing''s latest play takes inspiration from real life debates on captive elephants to ask poignant questions about our relationships with animals and the power dynamics that surround them.

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Book SynopsisIn Love in Another Language Dick Davis is shown to be the outstanding formal poet of his generation, a master of rhyme and metre, a poet worthy of keeping company with the best lyric writers in our tradition. His Collected Poems draws on eight previous publications and includes a section of new work. Davis has also established himself as `the leading translator of Persian literature in our time' (Washington Post) and this volume includes a selection of his celebrated translations. Davis's original poems evoke the experiences of travel and of living in a culture in which one is a stranger, where empathy is at once difficult and necessary. His translations can be read as a record of his attempts at such empathy, in poetic terms, across centuries and cultures.Trade Review'Our finest translator of Persian poetry' - the TLS; 'It is marvelous to find a poet whose poetry lives through its metre. His handling of it is masterful, and you are never aware of the effort. And the language is exact but relentless, like the perceptions . . . Davis is one of the best poets around.' - Thom Gunn; 'The leading translator of Persian literature in our time.' - The Washington Post

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Book SynopsisThis book, the first published anthology of British surrealist poetry, takes its title from Herbert Read's words when he opened the Surrealist Poems and Objects exhibition at the London Gallery at midnight on 24 November 1937. Within a few years the Second World War would effectively fragment the British surrealist movement, dispersing its key members and leaving the surrealist flame flickering only in isolated moments and places. Yet British surrealist writing was vibrant and, at its best, durable, and now takes its place in the wider European context of literary surrealism. On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight includes work by Emmy Bridgwater, Jacques B. Brunius, Ithell Colquhoun, Hugh Sykes Davies, Toni del Renzio, Anthony Earnshaw, David Gascoyne, Humphrey Jennings, Sheila Legge, Len Lye, Conroy Maddox, Reuben Mednikoff, George Melly, E.L.T. Mesens, Desmond Morris, Grace Pailthorpe, Roland Penrose, Edith Rimmington, Roger Roughton, Simon Watson Taylor and John W. Welson. Many of the poems are published here for the first time. The book also reproduces key manifestos produced by the British surrealists, and includes illuminating introductory essays, a detailed chronology, biographical notes on the writers, and a bibliography. Illustrated throughout with drawings by Bridgwater, Colquhoun, Earnshaw, Maddox, Morris, Rimmington and Welson, this anthology is a fascinating record of a neglected strand of British poetry from the 1930s to the 1980s. British surrealist writing is at last given a chance to voice its subversion.

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Book SynopsisAn often challenging, sometimes harsh book of disparate poetic images, this triptych travels the full arc through desire, lust, loss, memory, anger, discovery, and celebration. From the distinctly urban to the emotionally uncompromising, these three women express, each in her own voice, a cry, a laugh, a scream-the hybrid of which culminates in the call for imprint: 'A Siren Tattoo'.

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Book Synopsis'Fragments from the Big Piece' is a non-linear, stylized play inspired by eastern bloc film noir. While exploring the dark underbelly of the drug trade, the play simultaneously tells the story of a man and a womans crumbling relationship.

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Book Synopsis'Snatch' is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, 'Snatch' picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence. In her mysterious and funny debut, everybody's favourite Surrey grrrl, Judy MacInnes Jr. makes the complex seem simple, the simple complex, and she has anunearthly talent for making the reader laugh out loud while doing it. "Even if you hate poetry, 'Snatch' goes down kind of like a root beer float, all frothy and fizzy and real smooth." - The Coast

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Book Synopsis'Under the Abdominal Wall' is a moving collection of poetry, an elegy for ones loved and lost. The pieces in this volume focus largely on the subjects of childbirth, illness and loss-of a sibling and a parent. While the subjects of death and illness are forefront, they are countered by a theme of rejuvenation. McCartney addresses difficult, emotionally straining subjects head-on with strength, wonder and passion.

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Book Synopsis'Swing In the Hollow' is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton's language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience. "It is wonderfully subtle and witty, with the title setting a tone for the poems to follow." - Winnipeg Free Press

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Book Synopsis'Bogman's Music' is a debut collection of poetry that is both elegiac and sensitive in its exploration of family dynamics, the enduring power of childhood experience, and the healing ability of faith and love. "It's gritty and quirky, and at times almost spins out of but for a formality that always tends to rein in thing." - The Georgia Straight Governor General's Literary Award Nominee

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Book Synopsis'Articles of Faith' is a play designed to promote understanding of the controversial subject of the blessing of same-sex unions. The play is based on a series of interviews conducted by the author in a Pacific Northwest community where the issue of formal condoning and blessing of same-sex unions divided and eventually split an Anglican parish. "Intended to "spark a dialogue" regarding the Anglican Church's internal battlesover same-sex marriage, the play examines the case of a Port Alberni, BC parish that voted to "disaffiliate" from the church in 1996 in protest against its perceived openness toward blessing same-sex relationships. ...The result, if rarely dramatic or compelling, is a work that succinctly and earnestly voices a representative range of opinion on the issue." - Canadian Literature

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Book Synopsis'Red Mango' is a one-man play about a "single celibate sensualist" who constantly thinks about women-though not for sex, but for sweaty joy and sensual contact on the booming dance floors of Victoria's blues clubs. Charlie is a mid-40's, divorced blues fanatic: he is "between relationships" and addicted to the rapture of losing one's self in a crowded room of sweating, gyrating, heaving bodies, grinding to the rhythms of powerhouse blues. Humorous, poetic, 'Red Mango' played to sold-out houses at Victoria's Belfry Theatre. "The writing is so tight-no time wasted, word choices concise..." - Broken Pencil

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Book SynopsisOne night in April, after a Sunday soccer game, Alan Twigg couldn't remember the names of his two sons or his wife-and he couldn't hold a pen. An emergency CAT scan revealed a large brain tumour squeezed against his motor cortex. 'Intensive Care' tells the story of why this was a good thing. 'Intensive Care' isn't a medical survival story; it's a yearlong reflection on how the imminence of death can enhance life. The grass gets greener. Confirmation that one is loved is exhilarating, more powerful than any drug. On May 26th, 'The Globe & Mail' ran a front page story about a recent medical study that concluded one in five Canadians will have a tumour in their head at some point in their lives. Two days later, Dr. Christopher Honey, a neurosurgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, removed the benign tumour from Alan Twigg's head during a five-hour operation. He started writing again, in the Intensive Care ward, three hours later.

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Book SynopsisWhether considering the simplicity of a butterfly in flight or the terror of a cancer diagnosis, Heidi Greco confronts the world head-on, yet always with the fresh eyes of the stranger in our midst. The issues she addresses belong to the world; the settings she employs are international. At times funny and irreverent, these are pieces that dissect relationships, poems that delve as easily into the mysteries of nature as they do into the intricacies of daily living-encounters we immediately recognize. But whether serious or fun in their approach, her penetrating and unsentimental eye is always there, steadfast on the goods. "In the beauty of the language and the striking images, there is a pervasive sadness, a sub-text of depression. ...'Rattlesnake Plantain' is a collection of poems about loving, not being loved. Baudelaire understood." - Prairie Fire

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Book Synopsis'True Mummy' is a compelling drama, which presents provocative ideas and poses difficult questions connected to issues of life and death, morality and art, ritual versus utilitarianism, and the "opposing concepts of creation and desecration." 'True Mummy' refers to a black, luminous, clear glaze, the "best shellac in the history of art," that was made from the ash of cremated mummies. What is sacred today-anything? Is any degree of desecration justified in the pursuit of truth and thecreation of art? These are only a few of the questions posed in this provocative drama. "Cone's plays present a remarkable talent for layering history, visual art, philosophy and contemporary social issues to produce works that must be consumed with care, given the complexity of their ingredients."- The Rain Review Of Books

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Book SynopsisHeather Haley's poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers-and potential violence-hover like heat on the horizon. Whether theyre gangsta girls or riot grrrls, roaming the range or pacing the mall, Haley's women are always in the forefront, in the driver's seat, crankin' thewheel in their direction. Like wild horses bustin' loose, or an explosion in the kitchen, Haley's women know "how heady power is, how it lathers beneath a mount." Her characters bite life on the neck and take what they need; and just when they think it's gone, meaning happens. This is brawny and uncompromising language from a voice that demands to be reckoned with. "A supple and unusual book." - Lyle Neff, author of ' Full Magpie Dodge' and 'Bizarre Winery Tragedy'

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Book Synopsis'Unravel' addresses our universal experiences of time and place, and how those places shape who and what we are. 'Unravel' challenges our sometimes-complacent perceptions and justifies what we all hold dear: an address and an identity. "Armstrong pushes the potential of the lyric into darker places, inside the seams of bar booths, where things get lost." - The Georgia Straight

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Book Synopsis'Singer, An Elegy' is a long poem memorializing the author's father and, equally, the now-obsolete industrial culture that shaped him. 'Singer, An Elegy' has rhetorical lightning flashes but aspires to much greater straightforwardness than Fetherling's previous poetry. " 'Singer, An Elegy' possesses all the fine qualities of Fetherling's prose and in many ways gives them their freest rein. Eloquent passages and striking phrases allow a wide experience and erudition to operate here with often startling appropriateness." - The Globe & Mail

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Book SynopsisRooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. 'Cusp''s central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen's muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe's haunting photographs of Vancouver's neglected spaces and rejected objects, 'Cusp/detritus' is a testimony to an obsession with the lost. "It is intentionally unsettling, disturbing, sad, and you cannot deny it, a celebration of a life." - Prairie Fire

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Book Synopsis'Suicide Psalms' is both hymn and visceral scream-of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off of the ledge. Even though the media has recognized suicide as an epidemic, it is still not "talked" about outside of grief management and support groups. The subject remains taboo, and those left behind face a legacy of silence, shame and guilt. The poems in the first section of the book "Suicide Notes" attempt to answer the question "why"? Their density of language, slippage of syntax, sound play, repetition, and visceral imagery engender both empathy and relief, as each poem bears witness and pays homage. The work also addresses a larger collective malaise: the disintegration of society and "self," the loss of innocence and exploitation of youth, and the hopelessness and despair that smoulders under the veneer ofcorporate greed, rabid consumerism, and the resultant addictions, aberrations and violence. "And so it is that those friends who have lived close to suicide become the prophets who might lead us through the gathering darkness of our despairing ecocidal age-into more honourable, tender, sustainable ways of living together on this groaning, delicate, crying earth. 'That something better rises out of the ashes.' This is Rowley at her heart stammering, howling, apocalyptic, playful, musical best."- Di Brandt "The poems of Mari-Lou Rowley's 'Suicide Psalms' are deft, double-edged, 'kill sites bedded with violets,' songs of violent beauty. Scalene: the constantly shifting, sharpening edges and angles (no two sides ever the same) of 'Suicide Psalms'' three movements balance, ultimately, in a perfect complex structure. Dissonant; harmonic. Rowley's poetry, as always, a snapping, synaptical singing, stinging electric. In the necessary, unpredictable climate of 'Suicide Psalms', 'the windfingers/all possible points of entry/conclusions/ways out.'"- Sylvia Legris

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Book Synopsis'Brave New Play Rites' presents twenty years of original and startling theatre from Canadas best young writers. The book is a collection of short one-act plays written by students in the Creative Writing Program at UBC and produced at the annual festival, Brave New Play Rites, for public performances. Many successful writers have had their plays produced in the festival, including Lynn Coady, Steven Galloway, Dennis Bolen, Kevin Chong, and Aaron Bushkowsky. The release of 'Brave New Play Rites' coincides with the 20th anniversary year of the festival, and the familiar names in this collection will be of interest both critically, and to readers who already follow the careers of these writers.

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Book SynopsisPowered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in 'The Sleep of Four Cities' use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities-cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss-with only the map of language as a guide. The cities in this book are not always easily unlocked-they are at once tangible and invisible; they exist both inside and outside the speakers of the poems. Throughout the book, these speakers seek to discover what is within their grasp and what, like water, will slip through their fingers. "Currin's poetry attends us, lighting the ball at midnight, where first love and first terror are arm-in-arm, waiting in their figurative, gesticulating disguises to welcome us to a primitive happiness." - Rain Taxi

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Book SynopsisThe year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply 'Film', he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg. It doesn't take long for Alan to realize that he has entered into an altered universe resembling the surreal world of the Buster Keaton film, a worldwhere doors solve problems and card games provide lessons in life. Alan turns to Beckett for help in making sense of this world, only to find that Sam is perfectly at home in it. The play tracks Alan's journey through the maze that is the world of the Keaton film, a world which, as the making of 'Film' progresses, also takes on elements that might be found in a Beckett absurdist play. By examining the making of 'Film' as well as the comedy of the Keaton film, the play examines the process by which we create art in general as well as the process by which we live our lives.

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Book SynopsisFour disparate people confront each other, their memory, and their responsibility at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode. 'Tortoise Boy' is a "chamber play," four monologues, or mono-dialogues, if you will. The actors play many characters to tell the story, and they are also four voices, four instruments-a quartet-allowing them at times to step beside characters and show the story from other points of view. Can we have a future without a past? Is there any meaning to a past that has no future? When do our memories open doors, and when do they close them? What's best forgotten? What's indelible? The ancient Greeks believed that memory is the mother of the muses, and the words memory, muse, and music all share a common root.

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Book Synopsis'Inventory' is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, the book explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author's experience, from the mundane stapler and tea bag, to the mysterious, extinct dodo bird, to entities that blur the line between person and thing. In this way, the collection highlights the often hidden dimensions of the objects we encounter, including their temporal, political, locational and psychic aspects. It offers an opportunity for readers to reconsider their own investments in what, by dictionary definition, should be static categories. " 'Inventory' by Marguerite Pigeon examines life's often forgotten elements. From her portrait of "meaning" to her idyllic details of a clothespin, Pigeon is a master of naked realism and organic descriptions of expression. Her first publication, 'lnventory', was short-listed for the 2010 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. The book explores the lucid philosophy of simple pleasures it's a refreshing truth bound in a small package. 'lnventory' is a front-to-back read that meshes simplicity and intricacy in a witty and intelligent style. Pigeon's work is a gem of purity in a complex world." - Poetry is Dead Magazine

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Book Synopsis'Mutant Sex Party' is Ed Macdonald's first collection of plays. As well as the title piece, this collection includes 'The Escape Artist, Erratica, Gemini, Smoke & Blood, Hot Meat,' and 'Titus Lucretius Carus'. "There's an interesting and very complicated relationship to explore here; I was immediately curious about the power dynamic...and also about the element of hypocrisy." -nytheatre.com

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Book SynopsisEach new volume by Stuart Ross is a more confounding grab bag than the last. In 'You Exist. Details Follow.', his seventh full-length collection of poetry, Stuart Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Still, each poem breathes with the signature weirdness, the sharp wit and gentle awe that Ross is known for. Here you'll find new poems from Ross'songoing Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more. "A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems, 'You Exist. Details Follow.' Stuart Ross is no punk kid, but he writes with a refreshing snark. It's a voice much in evidence in his latest book, a collection of poems called 'You Exist. Details Follow.' (Anvil Press). He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions. Here are a misplaced tuba, badly sewn dog suits, and Highway 6 Revisited, about a butcher waking from a dream of meat, then dancing down a country road. Then you come across 'French Fries', a charming story of a child pretending to be asleep during a road trip: 'You smell French fries. It is time/to pretend to wake up.' In another poem, Ross wisely and parenthetically writes: (Tension is a good thing sometimes. For example, you shouldstick it in art.) Stuart Ross loves that tension, fortunately for his readers." -Uptown (Winnipeg)

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Book Synopsis'The Song Collides' takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world-and then back again via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life is an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simultaneous and nearly imperceptible process that lasts, we hope, at least until the exit. Calvin Wharton's poems in 'The Song Collides' pulse and soar with the sounds of beautiful music. Whether a specific one of 'The Song Collides'' lyrics, prose poems, sonnets, or elegies mentions music or not, Wharton's mastery of his art never fails to bring his words to resonant life in the ear and mind. He is a connoisseur of precise details that, transformed through his attention to the musicality of language, ring within the reader's memory like a favourite tune. -Tom Wayman, author of 'High Speed Through Shoaling Water' Here is a poetry ofgentle surprises, of the enjoyment of "salt air, sweet water / qualities that feed days / and grow into years," of ironies that enrich, "every answer lost in the question following." And even when we are reminded of everyday "skimpy wishes," how good to read these nuances so carefully shaped for our pleasure, each reminding us to "begin wherever you are, / but first look around." - David Zieroth, 'The Fly in Autumn'

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Book SynopsisTwenty-first century metalheads; twelfth century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz- what could they possibly have in common? The creation of an often misunderstood and at times reviled genre for one; for another, a kin preoccupation with the questioning of structures set up by class, gender, and religion. "Describing metal fans as "raw birds, eyes banged out of their heads," Owen's loving scorn allows her to walk a fine line between paying homage to the subculture and dissecting its darkness." - Winnipeg Free Press

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Book Synopsis'Vs.' is a collection of poems chronicling the author's foray into the world of amateur boxing. A shy, bookish woman you'd never expect could hit someone in the face, Ryan was soon hooked on the physical and mental challenge of the sport, as well as the camaraderie of the club's members and volunteers. When the club announced an upcoming white collar fight-an opportunity for novices to participate in an actual bout-she nervously decided to test her mettle. The writing of these poems became a way to process what she was learning in the ring as well as a method of exploration around her decision to participate in the fight. The poems explore her reasons for taking on the challenge, the way the sport changed her perceptions of herself and her capabilities, and how her relationship with her husband factored into the adventure. 'Vs.' is part instruction manual, part rationalization. Throughout the collection the author reflects on what it means to be a woman and a fighter, as wellas a poet and a fighter. But, ultimately, 'Vs.' is about the fights we all face: brain vs. body, intention vs. action, perceptions vs. identity, and who we are vs. who we want to be. "The poems in Kerry Ryan's 'Vs.' come at you like quick jabs of light the writing is taut, worked over, sinewy, spare, and lean but never mean. A delightful collection. What else can be said? These poems pack a punch." Jeanette Lynes, Author, 'The New Blue Distance' "Muhammad Ali, keep your guard up. You're being measured by a better boxing poet. Kerry Ryan has the clarity of vision that comes with a boxer's discipline and daring, the grace of a true poet's music of body and mind made one." Robert Kroetsch, Author, 'Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait' Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award

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Book SynopsisA collection of over two hundred poems spanning the sixty years of the author's life and the many countries in which he has lived and worked. Divided into four sections, after the Introduction: 1. "Birth, life, death" (largely autobiographical and family-related); 2. Songs and singers (the author's songs, and poems about singers and other musicians from many cultures); 3. The written word (reflections on authors and writing); 4. Facing off the thought police (poems on censorship, political repression, assassination), followed by a "Postscript on Czechoslovakia" in prose.

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Book Synopsis

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