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A lively contemporary translation of these action-packed medieval Icelandic poems.

With an intimate, comic, and compassionate eye, the twelve stories in Simple Creatures consider what it means to live with less in the twenty-first century. In this debut collection, featuring stories set in locations from the Pacific Northwest and upstate New York to the English coast, Robert McGill explores the heartaches and joys of people who are desperate to uncomplicate their complicated world. Through stories consisting of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, and the unspoken thoughts of a young scholar obsessed by Alice Munro, Simple Creatures also shows us the sometimes hilarious, often poignant ways in which our use of language shapes our relationships with others and ourselves. Along the way, we meet a teenager who wants to live among a community of Bigfoot that he claims to have discovered in the woods; the widow of a famous endocrinologist after she gains custody of a chimpanzee from his lab; a boy whose fledgling hockey career is troubled by the fact that his name is Peter Gretzky; and a divorcee seeking out the mysterious author of a viral environmental pledge. Through their lives, Simple Creatures offers an acute, sympathetic portrait of our time.

A stolen sign, `No Jews Live Here,¿ kept John Lorinc¿s Hungarian Jewish family alive during the Holocaust.From pre-war Budapest to post-war Toronto, journalist John Lorinc unspools four generations of his Hungarian Jewish family's journey through the Holocaust, the 1956 Revolution, and finally exodus from a country that can't rid itself of its antisemitic demons.This braided saga centers on the writer's eccentric and defiant grandmother, a consummate survivor who, with her love of flashy jewelry and her vicious tongue, was best appreciated from afar. Lorinc also traces the stories of both his grandfathers and his father, all of whom fell victim, in different ways, to the Nazis¿ genocidal campaign to rid Europe of Jews. This is a deeply reported but profoundly human telling of a vile part of history, told through Lorinc¿s distinctively astute and compassionate consideration of how cities and cultures work. Set against the complicated and poorly understood background of Hungary's Jewish community, The Sign on the Door is about family stories, and how the narratives of our lives are shaped by our times and historical forces over which we have no control.

The sky¿s the limit in these funny and sad head-in-the-clouds poems.The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet¿s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross¿s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany.

For bpNichol¿s 80th birthday, a selection of 80 pieces from his 1980s notebooks, an astounding trove of never-before-seen work.One of Canadäs most beloved poets, bpNichol (1944¿1988), left a huge legacy of poetry, prose, scripts, comics, and playful interrogation of language after his untimely passing in 1988. In celebration of what would have been Nichol¿s eightieth birthday, Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from Nichol¿s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer¿s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol¿s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol¿s ¿apprenticeship to language¿ and his playful daily exploration of the limits of writing.Lovingly edited by noted poet-scholars Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, who provide an afterword contextualizing Nichol¿s practice, Some Lines of Poetry is a map of hidden corners, a guidebook to poetic play, and a tribute to Nichol¿s ongoing influence.

The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy. This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It¿s a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems ¿ angry, funny, sad ¿ demand a new world for Indigenous women.

How can we build more accessible cities? Living Disability brings together vibrant perspectives on disability justice and urban systems.Living Disability is an anthology of disabled writers analyzing urban systems and proposing more equitable approaches to city building. A musician and snow removal expert, a queer curator, a public pool aficionado, and a journalist turned city councillor ¿ these are just some of the exciting voices that explore the actions and attitudes of disability justice. Essays and interviews push the conversation about accessibility beyond policy papers and compliance checklists to show how disabled people are already creating more inclusive spaces in cities of all sizes. Living Disability is universal in scope but intimate and local in focus, grounded in personal struggles and celebrations. Decisions about public transit, affordable housing, and park design all disproportionately impact disabled communities. By sharing stories and strategies, contributors share ways disabled thinkers and doers are embracing overlooked aspects of urban design and tackling the toughest problems facing cities. Each chapter provides context to welcome non-disabled readers into conversations about the future of inclusion so that all readers can develop their own understanding of what accessible cities look and feel like. This book appeals to city builders of all stripes committed to learning from and working with underrepresented communities. It equips architects, designers, community leaders, innovators, and citizens with the key concepts they need to collaborate with rather than care for disabled neighbors.

White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead in this absurdist take on the wellness retreatOur narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, inadvertently find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating a couple, the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the new Dhaliwals eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings on Trunity by the berobed Brad Beard, and some erotic counselling by Professor Seabass. Things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel. And then one of the retreaters is murdered and the real Dhaliwals show up. Accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter-accusations are made, until the whole retreat is caught up in a bizarre trial.In All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla, with his inimitable absurdist style, collides horror and humour into an utterly unforgettable satire.

The Empathy Exams of health anxiety: a personal, literary, and cultural examination of hypochondria from Kafka to Seinfeld.A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria combines incisive contemporary cultural critique, colourful literary history, and the author¿s own experience of chronic health anxiety to ask what we might learn from the hypochondriac¿s discomforting experience of their body.Hypochondria is unashamedly capacious in its range of references, from the writings of hypochondriacs such as Franz Kafka and Charlotte Brontë to novel yet accessible readings of theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Maurice Blanchot. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne, Robert Burton, Susan Sontag, FitBits, sleep ¿hygiene,¿ or the so-called narcissism epidemic, Rees treats his topic with a mixture of humour and seriousness while revealing himself to be an astute reader of all sorts of texts ¿ not sparing even himself with his own astute and irreverent takes on this popular ailment.An exercise in what Freud calls ¿evenly suspended attention,¿ Hypochondria demonstrates the rewards ¿ and perils ¿ of reading (too) closely the common but typically overlooked aspects of our lives.

Delicate poems and images show a sturdy pear tree and a fading love in this lost classic. Written after the end of a relationship, there's a persistent and gentle sadness among The Pear Tree Pomes, coloured by the intimacy of his awareness of a pear tree and its constancy. Coupled with illustrations by influential abstract painter David Bolduc, these delicate poems are part nature study, part ekphrasis, and part eulogy to recently ended romance. Kiyooka was also a painter, sculptor, musician, and teacher who cast a large shadow over Canadian literature and art. These poems are informed by the rhythm and shape of his practices of music and art, weaving across the page. Nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award, The Pear Tree Pomes won fans in well-known writers and artists across Canada. This reissue includes new archival material, giving readers the opportunity to (re)discover this graceful collaboration of poetry and art and the story behind it.

What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?Good Want entertains the notion that perhaps virtue is a myth that's outgrown its uses. Exploring the value and shame ascribed to our desires both silly and serious - artistic, superficial, spiritual, relational - these poems grapple with deeply rooted questions: How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Is clarity worth the pain of redefining your experience of the world? Is privacy the same as secrecy the same as deceit? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, dream, or confession, requiring a blind faith that feels increasingly more impossible to sustain. Good Want looks inward, at once both sincere and tongue-in-cheek, to confront the hum of class and intergenerational trauma. Playing with and deconstructing received notions of 'good,' 'bad,' and 'god,' these poems open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing. "These are lush, provocative poems that luxuriate in unexpected detail while examining how economic precarity shapes both shame and desire. Firmly rooted in the working class, Martinello explores the hunger we inherit from our ancestors, what it means to indulge from a position of bottomless want, and to 'Waste not your wanting.' With impressive range, a sense of humor, and entrancing musicality, Good Want is a celebration of the gluttony of girlhood, the paradoxes of faith, and everyday pleasures of a "small, specific life." - Cassidy McFadzean, author of Crying Dress"Good Want is a baroque painting of Dutch aristocracy, but all the subjects' garments are secretly from Walmart. I mean this in the best way. Each poem cracks me open and out shines a never-before-seen shade of light." - Shy Watson, author of Cheap Yellow"Sometimes the confessor reckons with the confessional. In Good Want, it's a wracking and lucky sometimes, full of piss and vinegar, and one that finds Domenica Martinello performing the wonderment, the depth and push and pull, between what there is to reveal and what each revelation ruptures or binds. Happily, sadly, the poet scours a life lived and unearths inheritances, burdens, and selves destined for and not for the telling. And tells them brilliantly as she pleases."  - D.M. Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top

Overthinking simple actions leads to overwhelming poems about what one can lean on if promised help doesn't helpI Will Get Up Off Of is a book about trying to leave a chair. How does anyone ever leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved - so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate. What is there to lean on when avenues promising help don't help? I Will Get Up Off Of explores the role art plays in survival and the hope that underlies any creative impulse. "The voice of these poems moves like a magical fish trapped in a small square bowl, dazzlingly alive inside an almost annihilating constriction. These poems play a serious game in a tight space, caught in the looping limbo between intention - "I will...", "I will...", "I will..."- and action. Simina Banu's skill and humour animate every line and gesture within this inventive drama that begins "(I will get up off of) this monobloc but I've been sentenced...." Sentenced to form and to language, Banu gives us a mind thinking its way toward freedom." - Damian Rogers, author of Dear Leader

Tech-inspired sonnets and prose poems that decode a life through the experience of lossTierney's new collection takes its title from lossless data compression algorithms. It positions the sonnet as lines of code that transmit through time and space those 'stabs of self,' the awareness of being that intensifies with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people. The qualities of light, colour, and movement in the sonnets conjure a sense of arrested time, of dust motes in the air. Playing against this intimacy are loopy chapters of Borgesian prose poems - with appearances from Duns Scotus and Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, Niels Bohr and others - that extract knowledge from information to reconstruct the source experience into a subjectivity, a personality, and a life. "Tierney tracks and backtracks in the realm of dispossession like a cross between a physicist and a magician from a future era. These poems are new forms for human heart and quiddity." - Anne-Marie Turza, author of Fugue with Bedbug"In this wise, wonky, poignant avowal of error and losslessness, Matthew Tierney geotags his 'freefall of associative memory,' where the past flickers presently and futures bend toward the start. Invoking the dogmas of digital media, quantum mechanics and philosophy, Lossless is the devlog of a child becoming father of the man. A 'greybeard & tweener' at once, Tierney conjures his Gen Xer youth-neighborhood bullies, the first kiss, jogging with a Walkman on-to tweak his hi-fi output as a husband and fumbling dad. Given a spacetime continuum offering 'viaducts of alternate choices,' in which everyone, at the molecular level, is 'swappable soma' at best, Tierney parses 'compossible paths' from 'incompatibilism,' trying to track the quirks and quarks of multidimensional life. In troubleshot sonnets and corrupted prose, this book is an ode to the lost art of losing gracefully." - Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun

THE TORONTO STAR''S  "30 BOOKS WE CAN''T WAIT TO READ THIS SPRING"The updated edition of a Toronto favourite meanders around some of the city’s unique neighborhoods and considers what makes a city walkableWhat is the ''Toronto look''? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s streetscapes for decades. His psychogeographic reportages situate Toronto''s buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.Stroll celebrates Toronto''s details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario."Shawn Micallef is the unofficial mayor of Toronto, the genial ambassador the city needs and deserves. As he strolls Toronto’s broad avenues and its little streets, he finds hidden pockets of delight – and weirdness, too. Join him and fall in love with the city again." – Liz Renzetti, author of Bury the Lead"Shawn Micallef looks at the city in a way we all should more often – he sees it as a living book that is alive with stories just waiting to be told to the attentive observer. In Stroll, he gives us an introduction to just how interesting and surprisingly dramatic those stories are, and how exciting our city is when we hear them." – David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto"A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish." – Douglas CouplandThis new edition updates things in the city that have changed and includes several new walks.

A rediscovered classic, Yesterdays turns colonialism on its head. Originally published in 1974, Yesterdays is nominally the story of one man's attempt to launch a Hindu Mission from Trinidad to convert the heathen Christians of Canada. Yet this conceit quickly derails into a ribald, outrageous portrait of West Indian village life, and a prescient, proto-parody of what would become the archetypal 'immigrant story.' Sacred cows both figurative and literal are skewered in a series of hilarious and increasingly bawdy encounters between villagers who gossip, cheat, and steal, but also form a balanced, if chaotic, collectivity. Yesterdays is one of the great lost English-language novels of the previous century-perhaps ahead of its own time upon its initial release, but sure to appeal to 21st-century audiences who will appreciate its startling prescience, linguistic inventiveness, as well as its bold singularity amid a canon glutted with paint-by-numbers respectability. "Yesterdays upends conventional narratives that find sexual liberation in the postindustrial city. Ladoo's agrarian villagers inhabit the fullness of their complex humanities in audaciously funny and often uncomfortable ways, and are radically at ease with their fluid sexual appetites. An under-appreciated gem, his novel is as much a testament to Ladoo's skillful observation and rendering of the world that surrounded him as it is to the value of being tellers of our own stories." - Andil Gosine, author of Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean

Rocky meets Elmore Leonard meets Miranda July as Pillow Wilson, a past-his-prime boxer, trains for his last title shot. Shenanigans ensue. Having recently undergone an ethical awakening, Pillow has converted to veganism and is in the middle of trying to rehome his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark) in humane animal shelters. His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, has recently faked his own death by waterfall, and has now gone incognito and is Pillow's in-house doping expert. The thing is, Pillow doesn't feel all that motivated to train for his next big fight, and he's further distracted from his training when his car and pet shark mysteriously disappear. Luckily, Sherlock is a master of deduction. What follows is part underdog sports story, part work of Neozoological Surrealism, and part existential mystery novel. "Reckless, desperate, and achingly human, Battershill remains funnier than anyone else on your shelf." - Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold"The adventures of Battershill's returning protagonist Pillow are witty and occasionally absurd, but the story never trips on ironies. Battershill twines the humanity of pulp noir with the unsettling play of surrealism to build a world in which pet sloths, Sherlock Holmes, and skilled drug pushers all seem to have found their ideal home." - Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time"Pillow Wilson is one of my favourite characters in CanLit, and he is in fine form in Pet, Pet, Slap, a deeply funny, inventive, bizarre, heartbreaker of a book. Andrew Battershill not only writes with that magical alchemy of humour and pathos that most writers only wish they could pull off, but he somehow also balances surrealism and profound humanity in a way I'm sure I'll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out. I haven't had this much fun reading in a long, long time." - Amy Jones, author of Pebble & Dove

THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023Martha Baillie‿s richly layered response to her mother‿s passing, her father's life, and her sister‿s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time. Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author‿s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author‿s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother‿s. And then, the shocking death of the author‿s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life. In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report. "Martha Baillie‿s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient taleâ€? of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie‿s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." ‿ Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women"This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn‿t put it down." ‿ Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness""Exquisite." ‿ Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife"I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.â€? ‿ Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker"This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author‿s identity by way of her mother‿s death, her sister‿s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." ‿ Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

Cowboy erotica meets Kathy Acker in this smart, raunchy look at a queer sexual awakeningSteacy Easton grew up Mormon, queer, and Autistic in the West. This book traces the people and spaces that made them who they are: the Mormon church, an Anglican boys‿ boarding school where they were sent to be ‿reformed‿ and where they were abused by a teacher, and then, later on, rodeos and bathhouses and mall bathrooms. The world Easton describes is one in which desire is complicated, where men ‿ ‿daddies‿ ‿ can be loving and they can be abusive, and there isn‿t always a clear distinction. Easton explores the essential texts of their sexuality, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Neil LaBute, Kip Moore to Lorelei James, and delves into their own encounters as they came of age. These daddy lessons are blunt about the pleasures of disobedience, slippery and difficult, revelling in the funk of memory and desire. "In dangerous times, Daddy Lessons dares to complicate the question of what children desire, including things that they probably shouldn‿t, and that adults must not exploit or manipulate. Except they do. Steacy Easton's meditations follow how such desires and disasters secrete an aesthetic and a self, and how something vivacious can spring from that muck, something like this book itself, smutty and shining and garlanded in jonquils." ‿ Carl Wilson, author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste"Steacy writes about the queer pleasure-seeking body in ways both fresh and eminently familiar." ‿ Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners"Daddy Lessons is a cocky and tender reclamation of childhood and teenage wanting." ‿ Vivek Shraya, author of I‿m Afraid of Men and People Change

A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living?Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall - a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. It's a place people love to hate and hate to love - a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend. Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming of age in North America's largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread - and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. "Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a mall, the book itself has a lot of everything, a sublime mix of memoir, history, and cultural criticism. Kate Black is a learned Virgil in the consumerist Inferno, always avoiding the obvious and leading us to surprising connections-oil, suicide, Reddit, squatters, dolphins. Whether malls fill you with nostalgia or horror, this book will change your relationship to the world we've constructed around us." - Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens"Before there was Instagram, there was the mall. But what happens when a seasonless, tacky, fantasyland is all you knew growing up? How does one embrace a genuinely fake experience? Or to be more precise, a fake but genuine experience? Kate Black's Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life. Love 'em or hate 'em, one thing's for sure: after reading this book, you'll never look at a mall in the same way again." - Ziya Tong, Science broadcaster & author of The Reality Bubble

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023In his follow-up to SKY WRI TEI NGS, Nasser Hussain tackles the absurdity of the English languageThe term “Love Languageâ€? can be read at least three ways: as an imperative, as the signoff to a letter, and as a contemporary way of talking about relationship styles. None of these would be wrong in this book. Love Language loves language. These are poems that repeat and hypnotize as English becomes more absurd: from Apple's terms and conditions to other poet's love poems, from performance reports to pop songs, Hussain skillfully and joyfully toys with everyday texts to talk about love, to think about poems, to call out racism, to remind us that words can be fun. Allow these playful poems to woo you, to let you fall in love with language again."Think of 'time as a lantern,' suggests Nasser Hussain, in these inimitable poems that take play seriously and allow seriousness to enter the room disguised as incantation. These are poems that long to dismiss the lyric‿s most recent pretty mask of polite propriety and instead take us to the lyric‿s ancient roots. It started way back, the poet says, 'when a cave person made a grunt,' to speak the name of a thing. Indeed. This is the lyric‿s ancient pact with the world: to spin playful language into seriousness of giving things their names‿what are we without this speaking, this tune? Hussain knows this and writes beautiful poems‿and I, for one, am grateful." ‿ Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"Hussain's humour is never complacent; it is the opposite of a defence mechanism (we are encouraged to imagine such a thing) and wryly sidesteps the bad binary of conservative withdrawal as set against algorithm-envenomed hyperassertion. He puts into words a new masculinity maturer than we deserve, that acknowledges swerves of defiance to be inseparable from underswells of doubt." ‿ Vidyan Ravinthiran, author of The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves? Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone's poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we're never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar. "There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‿each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.‿ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone ‿ despite a future only as certain ‿as the body // it inhabits‿ ‿ offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." ‿ Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems"The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living 'between / age and agency.' Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal." ‿ Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar

A reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human. Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey‿s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding‿s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositionsâ€? on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,â€? each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake‿s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual. Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling‿s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn‿t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.â€?"Matthew Gwathmey‿s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists ‿ evoked so fetchingly in the book‿s illustrations ‿ Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to 'what must remain / nameless.' There‿re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they‿ll tone up your grip on what poetry is." ‿ John Barton, author of Lost Family“We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other." Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey's poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text ‿ an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history ‿ Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire." ‿ Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book"Gwathmey's poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present." ‿ Paul Legault, author of The Tower

"Dickinson after her death: a novel of the women who brought Emily Dickinson's poems out of the shadows Grieving the loss of her sister and alone in a big house, Lavinia goes through Emily's things and wonders what to do with her sister's poems. She enlists the help of Susan, Emily's best friend and brother Austin's wife, who rouses herself from a deep depression to put the poems into some order to approach a publisher. Lavinia also brings Austin's mistress, Mabel, into the project for her worldliness and connections. In the wings, there is Millicent, Mabel's daughter, a little girl like Emily in spirit, wise and strong-willed, and fascinated by things big and small in the world around her. Delicate like lacework with dark threads running through it, Pale Shadows picks up the story of Emily Dickinson where Paper Houses left off, to explore the place of women in history, their creativity, and the enduring power of Dickinson's poetry."--

"From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s. Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara's mother sends Yara away from their home in Brazil on a Birthright trip to Israel for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires. But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto, where she begins to see her relationship in the new, uncertain light of sexual abuse; then California, where she plays with the line between erotic film and real life. As Yara wanders, she tries to keep her head above water, connecting the dots between the lands in which she finds herself, the places she has been, and the places she is headed."--

Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light showIn Surface Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning, letters and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs and logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater. Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us, the pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right, we are soaking in it!Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque collages.Not words, letters; not letters, shapes; not shapes, figures; not figures, ciphers; not ciphers, ornaments; not ornaments, decoration; not decoration, semiotics; not semiotics, communicative possibilities; not vagrant potential, slowly forming inflection; not melting deflection, language as dance: in, out, upside down, flapping, flipping, all ways round. Charles Bernstein, recipient 2019 Bollingen Prize for American PoetryThe striking compositions youll find inSurface Tensionare being presented sequentially in book form, yet that they wouldnt be out of place hanging on the wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves Gomringer when writing that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works merit sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter on the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their 'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and, here, 'that is poetry as I need it,' to quote Cage. Think of them as anti- advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful manifestations of the irreducible plasticity of numbers, punctuation marks, and letter forms. No logos. Mnica de la Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature, Brooklyn College; co-editor ofWomen in Concrete Poetry 19591979With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging the twentieth-century tech- nology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry into the twenty-first century. WithSurface Tension, Beaulieu takes the possibilities of that new idiom even further, unsettling the fixity his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging the set in Letraset as poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves, sag as if under their own weight, pool and smear in the liquid logic of heated ink, or swoop and blur as if in motion. In the process, these poems make visible the filmic potential of the photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers from brittling stock, and the three-dimensional substrate of the page with its flexible bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part about their own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a self-aware and intelligent process. Craig Dworkin, author ofRadium of the Word: A Poetics of MaterialityWhen most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to poetically intervene within these spaces that are not traditionally poetic? The answer to Derek Beaulieus question, put forward in his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten bril- liantly adventurous visual poems in hisSurface Tensionmake a startling case for his fascinating Letraset /photocopier inventions. Beaulieus compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical narrative; soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he calls 'a poetry of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp would have called it the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple Symmetry' or 'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their minutely evolving new spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting book a book producing new pleasures with each turn of the page. Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University

Ways of Seeing meets Mary Ruefle in these visual-art-inflected poemsThough they started from Sheryda Warreners impulse to see herself more clearly, the poems in Test Piece ended up becoming more expansive meditations on seeing and vision. They engage with the process and practice of art-making, and specifically with abstract minimalist works like those by Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, Ruth Asawa, and Agnes Martin.Not-seeing/not-knowing is a motif, as is weave, grid, pattern, rhythm of interiors, domestic life. These poems are informed by collage, by the act of bringing images and lines together. With their echoes and reverberations (hand, mirror, body, clear, form, face), a greater complexity is revealed.In conversation with visual art, mirrors, and the traces of self we assemble through encounter, Sheryda Warreners Test Piece holds an expansive place to dwell with the phenomenological. Interacting with event and object, reflection and parataxis, the writing asks us to consider contingent spaces and the matter of matter and meaning making. The poems adhere as arrangement, as a consideration of relationality. 'What does she whimper in the dogs ear? / How earthly we behave, believing were alone.' Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your TreasureSheryda Warrener's newest poetry collection unspools as a complex weave of repeated motifs, ritualistic gestures, and deeply embodied observations. Im especially struck by the influence of twentieth-century women artists within the collection: meditations on Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, and Sherrie Levines works structure much of Test Piece. Palimpsests of photographed interiors, where living and writing collide lyrically and randomly, combine with floating textual cut-ups of variegating transparency. This concretizes, perhaps, how the poems bloom forth from experimental assemblage: 'her body holds/the long blue sentence of it' Marina Roy, artist and author of Queuejumping

LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATUREIs love real if the beloved isnt? Girl, Interrupted meets Rebecca in this taut tale of love and madnessWhen Tia meets Pacifique, its a once-in-a-lifetime love. They spend five wild days and nights together, and then Tia wakes up in an ambulancewith a collarbone broken in a bike accident and no trace of Pacifique. Unable to convince anyone that Pacifique exists, Tia winds up in a psychiatric ward, forced to face the possibility that this perfect lover may be a figment of her imagination. While there, Tia meets Andrew, a contemplative man with schizophrenia, who falls in love with Tia. He, too, tells her to forget Pacifique. Who to believe? The medical establishment and her fellow patients? Or her frail human memory? And if Pacifique truly is a figment, is life in the real world with Andrew enough?In concise and vibrant prose, Sarah L. Taggart illuminates the dark corners of delusion (or is it delusion?) and a mental-health system that consigns people to endless limbo. Lucid and destabilizing, graceful and raw, this novel asks: is losing ones sanity so different from falling in love? Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love StoriesPacifique turns the psychological thriller on its head, allowing madness to be a meaningful lens through which to see the world instead of a cheap plot twist. Taggart has created a stunning, smart and revolutionary novel here - one that forces its readers to see clearly what so often remains hidden. This book means so much to me. One of the best I've read in years. Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out On The Ground

All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut Its a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riels letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebalds The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres. These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated byFalling Hourand Hughs sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a fake country. Andr Babyn, author ofEvie of the DeepthornFalling Houris a profound incantatory exhalation a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end.Simon Okotie, author ofAfter AbsalonA stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page. Mauro Javier Crdenas, author of Aphasia: A Novel

WINNER OF THE 2022 WRITERS' TRUST BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICYIs the smart city the utopia weve been waiting for?The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year.But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities one defined by utopian ideologies, architectural visions, and technological fantasies.Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, Dream States unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places.John Lorincs incisive analysis in Dream States reminds us that the search for urban utopia is not new. Throughout the book, Lorinc underscores the fact that a gamut of urban innovations from smart city megaprojects to e-government to pandemic preparedness tools only provide promise when scrutinized together with the political, economic, social, and physical complexities of urban life. Shauna Brail, University of TorontoDream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias takes us on a fascinating journey across world cities to show how technology has shaped them in the past and how smart city technology will reshape them in the future. This book is essential reading for policy makers, researchers, and practitioners interested in understanding the opportunities and challenges of smart city technology and what it means for city building. Enid Slack, University of Toronto School of CitiesUtopia may be the oldest grift in the city-building business, but Dream States shows that technology is a timeless tool for turning the most ordinary of urban dreams clean air and water, safe streets, and decent homes into reality. As digital dilettantes try to sell us on a software overhaul, John Lorinc provides us an indispensable and flawless guide to the must-haves and never-agains of the smart city. Anthony Townsend, Urbanist in Residence, Cornell Tech, author of Smart Cities