Words like radio waves, bouncing off the spectres of mortality, middle age, and the mundane. Arriving at middle age was a decisive experience for David O'Meara, standing equidistant to the past and future with its accompanying doubts and anticipations, inviting re-evaluation of past goals, confronting personal loss, and the death of his father and friends. These are the masses on radar, indistinct but detectable existential presences encroaching, and in the center of the radar is the lyric 'I' sweeping its adjacent experience. Poems like "e;I Carry a Mouse to the Park Beside the Highway,"e; "e;I Keep One Eye Open and One Eye Closed,"e; and "e;I Sleep as the Volcano Ash Falls like Snow,"e; usher the reader through thematic corridors of memory, fracture, and recovery. Embracing uncertainty and incorporating seasonal forecasts, humour, trivia, satire, politics, the environment, loss, and the mundane, these poems are a detection system signaling a paradox of meanings.
A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson's BluetsAs Daphn B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora's website, she's increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be.The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manleylike Daphn, a Montreal poet and essayistthe book's English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.';The most radical book of 2020 talks about makeup. Radical in the intransigence with which Daphne B hunts down the parts of her imagination that capitalism has phagocytized. Radical also in its rejection of false binaries (the authentic and the fake, the futile and the essential) through the lens of which such a subject is generally considered. With the help of a heady combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography, a poet scrutinizes her contradictions. They are also ours.' Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir';[Made-Up] is a delight. I read it in one go. And when, out of necessity, I had to put it down, it was with regret and with the feeling that I was giving up what could save me from a catastrophe.' Laurence Fournier, Lettres Qubcoises, five stars"e;Made-Up is a radiant, shimmering blend of memoir and cultural criticism that uses beauty culture as an entry point to interrogating the ugly contradictions of late capitalism. In short, urgent chapters laced with humor and wide-ranging references, Daphn B. plumbs the depths of a rich topic that's typically dismissed as shallow. I imagine her writing it in eye pencil, using makeup to tell the story of her life, as so many women do."e; Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points"e;A companion through the thicket of late stage capitalism, a lucid and poetic mirror for anyone whose image exists on a screen."e; Rachel Kauder Nalebuff"e;Made-Up is anything butcommitted to the grit of our current realities, Daphn B directs her piercing eye on capitalism in an intimate portrayal of what it means to love, and how to paint ourselves in the process. Alex Manley has gifted English audiences with a nuanced translation of a critical feminist text, exploring love and make-up as a transformative social tool."e; Sruti Islam"e;The book will leave you both laughing in recognition and wincing at the reality of the beauty world's impact on our collective psyche."e; Chatelained"e;[Made-Up] examines the intersection of beauty culture and consumer culture... Aided by the work of writers like Anne Carson, Anne Boyer, Amanda Hess, and Arabelle Sicardi... B. makes sharp observations about the ideologies behind both beauty [...] and consumerism."e; Bitch Media"e;MadeUp: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism is well worth reading."e; Literary Review of Canada"e;[Made-Up], newly translated by writer/poet Alex Manley from its original French, puts an intersectional, feminist lens on the author's personal fascination with the makeup industry; it also reckons with the cultural dominance of this fascination as she aims to square anti-capitalist principles with beauty-product obsession."e; BitchReads: 11 Books Feminists Should Read in September
The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of âindie gamesâ? â¿ with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world. Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Far Shore, has been released for Sony PlayStation and Epic Games Store. In the decade from inception to launch, Adams brought author Adam Hammond along for the ride, allowing unprecedented insight into the complicated genesis of Jett. The Far Shore offers a portrait of the enigmatic Adams and his team, the genius and artistry, the successes and setbacks, that went into building the world of JETT, in which youâ¿re tasked with scouting a new home for a humanoid people after theyâ¿ve decimated their planet. To provide context, Hammond recounts the history of indie games and how their trajectory has followed that of independent art and literature. A riveting insiderâ¿s look at one of our most popular art forms.
Kicking ass and taking notes—what it's like to be a woman in the ring.Alison Dean teaches English literature. She also punches people. Hard. But despite several amateur fights under her belt, she knows she will never be taken as seriously as a male boxer. ';You punch like a girl' still isn't a compliment — women aren't supposed to choose to participate in violence.Her unique perspective as a 30-something university lecturer turned amateur fighter allows Dean to articulately and with great insight delve into the ways martial arts can change a person's — and particularly a woman's — relationship to their body and to the world around them, and at the same time considers the ways in which women might change martial arts.Combining historical research, anecdotal experience, and interviews with coaches and fighters, Seconds Out explores our culture's relationship with violence, and particularly with violence practiced by women."e;An important addition to women's martial arts scholarship, Dean provides personal insight into the radical space women occupy in sport fighting. Seconds Out is a must-read for all fighters looking for mentors in the complicated world of martial arts."e; —L.A. Jennings, author of Mixed Martial Arts: A History from Ancient Fighting Sports to the UFC"e;Dean brings a fresh new female voice to the topic of combat sports."e; —Trevor Wittman, renowned MMA trainer, UFC analyst, and founder of ONX Sports"e;Trained in the discipline and art of both fighting and literature, Dean combines both with style. She honors the fighters, writers, and historians who have come before her and definitively ends the idea of women fighters as a novelty. Seconds Out is a must-read for anyone who feels the call of the bell and reverence for a good fight."e; —Sue Jaye Johnson
Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry AwardSmart, raunchy poems that are sorry-not-sorry.Sticky, sad, and sultry, Exhibitionist is a merry-go-round circling back to the tender, awkward parts of ourselves. Molly Cross-Blanchard allows her poems to ask the reader out for ice cream, to fart at a dinner party, to sprawl out on a chaise lounge, stare through a dusty skylight and whisper that they think they may love you. And that love will be unmistakably mutual. Mallory Tater, author of The Birth Yard and This Will Be GoodMultiple orgasms appear in the first line of the first poem in Exhibitionist. Multiple orgasms, as a relative image or a practice, elicit everything from mystical worship to moral panic. Molly Cross-Blanchard understands this diametric power. She nods to this power with countless crisp and explicit images throughout her debut collection. Read her poems first to marvel at the well-crafted voicing of sexuality. Read a second time to appreciate Cross-Blanchards beautiful charge of juxtaposition. Again and again, she places the erotic beside mundane so that both are transformed a dirty basement carpet becomes the backdrop of profound intimacy and gas station coffee acts as a symbol of self-discovery. Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me and Sodom Road ExitIf this book had a fragrance, it'd be a Britney perfume, any one of them really, but with hints of prairie in the dry late-summer, notes of the sweet ocean smell that passes through Vancouver when the wind gets high, and a fabulous pair of overalls. Katherena Vermette, author of River Woman and The BreakOne minute shes drying her underwear on the corner of your mirror, the next shes asking the sky to swallow her up: the narrator of Exhibitionist oscillates between a complete rejection of shame and the consuming heaviness of it. Painfully funny, brutally honest, and alarmingly perceptive, Molly Cross-Blanchards poems use humour and pop culture as vehicles for empathy and sorry-not-sorry confessionalism. What this speaker wants more than anything is to be seen, to tell you the worst things about herself in hopes that youll still like her by the end.
WINNER OF THE HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARDRich and diverse narratives of Indigenous Toronto, past and presentBeneath many major North American cities rests a deep foundation of Indigenous history that has been colonized, paved over, and, too often, silenced. Few of its current inhabitants know that Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day.With contributions by Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians, this unique anthology explores the poles of cultural continuity and settler colonialism that have come to define Toronto as a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived."This book is a reflection of endurance and a helpful corrective to settler fantasies. It tells a more balanced account of our communities, then and now. It offers the space for us to reclaim our ancestors' language and legacy, rewriting ourselves back into a landscape from which non Indigenous historians have worked hard to erase us. But we are there in the skyline and throughout the GTA, along the coast and in all directions." -- from the introduction by Hayden King
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions â¿ government, education, industry, and media â¿ with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action. Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline ValenciaProceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.
The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian.Avant Desire moves through Brossard's body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers.Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard's fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking.Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard's thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.
From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it.
A classic feminist novel for a new generation, resonating in a world of increasing radicalization.
bronchia thinkform a bombsightthink periosteum singingparticle falconry workpiecetwo lowcut hills seekingwhat stone isfor bodyis herdalliterationsNight & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.‘A fierce, ladderlike cri de cœur – at times a cri de cur – Night & Ox pulses with sawblade nocturnes that gnaw through the very rungs on which they’re wrung. One part Jabberwocky-talkie, one part fatherhood ode, the poem seeks a threshold, where the “mondayescent” gives way to ardour, splendour, even love. Scott is a cosmoglot of the throat’s ravine, and this is his manic, pandemonic article of faith.’ – Andrew ZawackiPraise for Blert:‘Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism.' – Dennis Lee
A poem-by-poem revisioning and engagement with Sylvia Plath's Ariel and the towering mythology surrounding it.
Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today's cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo, and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know "e;you"e; is you? Can you wake him to move his arm? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in The Best Canadian Poetry 2013, and he was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.
An unflinchingly subversive, aversive, conversive poetic look at the underbelly of Canadian settler-colonial experience.
Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock's deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgangers, the Kraken, and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history.What I mean to say is, the evidence is always there.From where we stand, we confuse lampposts for ghosts.Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in several journals, including Event and Fiddlehead. She is reviews editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.
Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and "e;natural"e; spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire while they scan scenes as an outsider or camera eye to unsettle and fray familiar settings. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. These are little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing.Let their ribs stretch out there is no figurewhich is not also a ground inits arctic plane. Cutting rooms as luckwould have it have academic sincerity.Sarah Pinder was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. This is her first collection.
Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards)If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge that gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming.She made hyphens and made me use them.From her back she pulled brackets. Saying:"e;These in your throat and these around your neck."e;Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Ex Machina and Clockfire, which was shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award.
Written by a Second City alum, this genre-bending, multi-character comic play is part graphic novel, part Japanese horror film.
New Theatre represents a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that investigate the process of meaning. Coolly cerebral poems about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's later life muse on power and identity, while an intimate autobiographical long poem counterpoints several quieter, equally surprising pieces that spike and bloom. Autumn.The sky streaked with silk parachutesor by tears.A sparkling epidemic. I think if the world truly tore in half it would seep blue. Susan Steudel is the recipient of several awards for her poetry, including a Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for emerging artist. New Theatre is her first book.
"e;The empire's missing links are found deep in this poet's ever-astonishing states of multiple consciousnessastutely attuned to the pressured, violent, mass conformities forced upon usbrilliantly formed into poems as ambitious and achieved as any written in the English language today."e;Lawrence Joseph In these dramatic monologues, Walid Bitar delivers variations on the theme of power: in politics, in the subjugation and abuse of other cultures, and in our divided selves. Using satire, parody, koan, and riddle, Divide and Rule struggles with the mendacity of language and identity. They have no maps. Ours, I'll redraw.Isn't itself, their neck of the woods,needs a restsomething more than a nap,and less than death, though death wouldn't hurt. Walid Bitar's poetry collections include 2 Guys on Holy Land, Bastardi Puri, and The Empire's Missing Links. He was born in Beirut and lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.Jenny Sampirisi is the managing editor of BookThug and co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing. She is the author of the novel is/was.
"e;McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack."e;The Washington PostMelding the deeply personal and the culturally popular, Li'l Bastard is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar. Written in part as an homage to John Berryman and Robert Lowell, this sequence of sixteen-line poems"e;chubby sonnets"e;explores the poet's obsessions (food, aging, baseball, beer, and Barnaby Jones) and map his midlife crisis on a wild flight through Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas, and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li'l Bastard will cement David McGimpsey's status as a beloved original.David McGimpsey is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including Lardcake and Sitcom. He teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.
In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwins balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwins trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.
Pompoms, blackberries and Value Village: Take a stroll through the thoughts of one of Canada's most intriguing poets and thinkers.
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