Poetry

Cusp/Detritus
by Catherine Owen
photographs by Karen Moe

Cusp/Detritus is a collection of narrative and lyric poems chronicling the lives of society's liminal individuals. Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a Commercial Drive panhandler, 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 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.

Poetry/ Photography
128 pp, 7 x 7
ISBN 1-895636-74-4
$16 CAN / $14 US

Signs of the Times
By Bud Osborn and Richard Tetrault

Signs of the Times reunites the poetry of Bud Osborn and the woodprints of Vancouver printmaker and painter Richard Tetrault. As with their first collaboration, Oppenheimer Park, Signs of the Times is both an unflinching look at Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and a beautiful object in its own right.

"Signs of the Times are all around us. But whether we choose to see and act is another matter. ... In this second collaboration Osborn and Tetrault collide their mediums, and produce stunning images and words that provoke an emotional, visual, intellectual and political response. ... Their work portrays compassion, love, power and despair, oppression, but above all, a hope of what can be, for all of us, privileged or not. If this is your first encounter with these two remarkable artists, you will be drawn to learn more of the people, places and experiences of which they write. For those already familiar with the poetry and prose of Osborn and visual art of Tetrault, it is a strengthening and determination to continue the struggle for justice and liberation for all people who are oppressed by a soul destroying system."
—Libby Davies, Member of Parliament (from the Preface)

Art/Poetry
48 pp, 9.5 x 7.5 (2-colour woodprints throughout)
ISBN: 1-895636-71-X
$20 CAN / $16 US

The Sleep of Four Cities
by Jen Currin

Powered 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.

"Jen Currin is a balladeer of incongruity, a wanderer in 'the deep slums of emotion,' her poetic landscape a noisy lounge populated by the likes of new moons and salamanders, orphans and elephants, her sculpted lines falling 'over one another/like dominoes' in a relentless forward motion of exotic language and erotic imagery. From now on, Jen Currin is my 'designated dreamer.'"
—Sharon McCartney, The Fiddlehead

" With these evocative and sinuous poems, The Sleep of Four Cities reminds us what it is like to fall in love with language all over again. Currin has a flawless ear and the collection moves melodically from moment to surprising moment. This debut work is something to savor and return to, a book which affirms 'there is no ordinary.'"
—Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Poetry
112 pp, 5.5 x 7.5
ISBN: 1-895636-70-1
$15 CAN / $12 US

Bizarre Winery Tragedy
by Lyle Neff

Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism. These poems continue Neff's quest to explore the modern-day juxtaposition of urban and rural landscapes, and the lines of power between the countryside and the metropolis-firewood, dams and the WiFi-enabled grid. Deeper insights emerge in this, the author's third published collection. Bizarre Winery Tragedy is 21st-century poetry that juggles death and technology and finds some nasty laughs in the process. Think of it as a strange and tragic road trip through British Columbia's wine-consuming regions, with Neff at the wheel.

Praise for Lyle Neff:

"These poems pack a wallop. They're full of outrage and bravado, tempered by amazing insights and a highly developed musical sensibility. They 'steam and churn' with the energy of the city, they burn with this young poet's 'hottest fire of sight'." —Lorna Crozier

"Lyle Neff understands, without the melodrama and hysterics of so many of his contemporaries, the duality of his natural surroundings-trees and skyscrapers, mountains and public transit-and never once portrays this with anything less than a lyric beauty full of imagination, humour, and optimism."
—Evan Jones, New Canadian Poetry

"Lyle Neff's as indiosyncratic and epigrammatic, as off-kilter and dead-on, as insolent and restless and thoughtfully skilled as a poet should be. From here on in almost everybody else is playing catch-up."
—Michael Holmes

Poetry
64 pp, 5 x 7
ISBN: 1-895636-66-3
$14 CAN / $12 US

Singer, An Elegy
by George Fetherling

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 is a brilliant poem. Fetherling takes John Thompson's ghazal form, mixes in the cadences of Dennis Lee and William Carlos Williams and emerges with a masterpiece. It recovers the elegy for the 21st century."
— George Elliott Clarke

Poetry
74 pp, 5 x 6
ISBN: 1-895636-61-2
$14 CAN / $10 US

Viral Suite
by Mari-Lou Rowley

Viral Suite explores our relationship with self, other, environment, sapce, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here
/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet.

"The poems in Viral Suite are exuberant in their exploration of the body as 'a vast zone of sensation,' including a palpable face-to-face throat singing with the poem as a body, proprioceptive and linguistic, and always right in front of us. Mari-Lou Rowley takes us down a homeo path of scientific and poetic lyric in an amazement of molecular dance through the lush genetics of life on the move. Very contagious stuff." — Fred Wah

"The poems in Viral Suite are smart, sexy, and crackling with linguistic energy. Mari-Lou Rowley upsets lyric expectations, mixing discourses— natural history, astronomy, aesthetics, contemporary artspeak, myth— in poems leavened with wordplay and wit. Viral Suite is a pleasure to read.
— Hilary Clark

Poetry
102 pp, 6 x 7
ISBN: 1-895636-58-2
$16 CAN / $12 US

Unravel
by Tammy Armstrong

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.

Poetry
92 pp, 5 x 8
ISBN: 1-895636-60-4
$16 CAN / $12 US

Honeymoon in Berlin
by Tom Walmsley

Honeymoon in Berlin examines the extremes of human desire, and investigates the human fascination with limits, the line between courage and fear, life and death.

"An utterly fearless riff on a very dark vision. Honeymoon in Berlin is all high wire and no net. I liked it, felt guilty, then liked it more.
— Michael Dennis

"In Honeymoon in Berlin, Tom Walmsley evokes a twilight world where men and women furtively tap away at keyboards, trying to connect not only with each other, but also with their own deepest impulses. A tense, disturbing sequence of poems, this pared-down masterpiece is packed with the stuff of a full-length novel: it is about death and shit and love and hope." — Stuart Ross

Poetry
64 pp, 5.5 x 7
Illustrated
ISBN: 1-895636-57-4
$16 CAN / $12 US

Sideways
by Heather Haley

Heather 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 backroads 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 they’re 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’ the wheel 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.

Poetry
84 pp, 5.75 x 8.75
ISBN: 1-895636-54-X
$14 CAN / $10 US

Rattlesnake Plantain
by Heidi Greco

Whether 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.

Poetry
104 pp, 5.25 x 8
ISBN: 1-895636-43-4
$14CAN / $9.95 US

Intensive Care
a memoir by Alan Twigg

One 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 year-long 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.

"one of the most unlikely and riveting poetry books of recent seasons"
—Telegraph Journal

"affecting poems that skimp on medical detail and emphasize feelings of wonder"
—Vancouver Sun

Memoir/Poetry
80pp, 5" x 8"
ISBN: 1895636-47-7
$14 can/$10 us

Bogman's Music
By Tammy Armstrong

GOVERNOR GENERAL'S
LITERARY AWARD NOMINEE

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. A section from Bogman's Music was shortlisted for the Acorn Rukeyser Chapbook Contest. This is what the judges had to say about Ms. Armstrong's work:

"These are lovely poems, heartfelt, mature, searching, and visceral...the manuscript is teeming with stunning images and metaphors...inventive and apt writing graces the entire manuscript."
—Tim Bowling (author of Low Water Slack, Dying Scarlet, The Thin Smoke of the Heart)

"This poet, detail after detail creates lyrically linked solid poems. They start out on the ground and then with a subtle shift, they lift."
—Sue Goyette (Governor General's Award Nominee)

Poetry
92 pp    6 x 9
ISBN: 1-895636-37-X
$13.95 CAN / $9.95 US

Swing In The Hollow
By Ryan Knighton

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.

"At once attentive and receptive to the kitsch and debris of branded recognitions and cartoon iconographies—the geography of Vancouver— Knighton's poems trace a bright path through pandemoniumm, a place where "beauty seems sometimes best / served blindly." These poems capture the texture of the ordinary—coffee shops, bus chatter, bar talk, suburban haunt—with wit and insight."
—Sharon Thesen

Poetry
100 pp    5 x 9
ISBN: 1-895636-34-5
$13.95 CAN / $9.95 US

Snatch
By Judy MacInnes Jr.

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 an unearthly talent for making the reader laugh out loud while doing it.

"This is right-on contemporary writing—loose but nuanced, anecdotal yet relevant. I recommend Snatch to anyone who willingly forgot what it was like to grow up."
—Michael Turner (author of Hard Core Logo, American Whiskey Bar, The Pornographer's Poem)

"The writing gives off a cloying sweetness, a raw honey-gobbling sexuality. This is a teenage wasteland of boyfriends and girlfriends as anonymous as junkfood. ... Snatch is a book of poetry that real people, and not just libraries, are meant to buy."
—Mark Cochrane, The Vancouver Sun

Poetry
96 pp    5½ x 6½
ISBN: 1-895636-27-2
$12.95 CAN / $9.95 US

Full Magpie Dodge
By Lyle Neff

Full Magpie Dodge is about the shiny brightness of modern urban life, its pressures and joys. More-or-less artful dodgers populate its pages, along with office workers, crows, exhausted junkies and jubilant lovers. Intertwined with all their lives is the unforgotten rural past and the still-turbulent North; in short, it's a book that takes Canadian life as it is: startlingly robust, enduring, and sometimes beautiful.

"All creeping power and miraculous handling, Full Magpie Dodge is a damned fine piece of machinery. With orange pop, Crazy Carpets, Kraft Dinner, and Primer Ministers, Lyle Neff's as idiosyncratic and epigrammatic, as off-kilter and dead-on, as insolent and restless and thoughtfully skilled as a poet should be. From here on in almost everybody else is playing catch-up."
— Michael Holmes (author of Watermelon Row)

Poetry
96 pp, 5 x 8
ISBN: 1-895636-28-0
Price: $13.95 CAN / $9.95 US

Under the Abdominal Wall
By Sharon McCartney

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.

"This is an extraordinary first book, a voice relentless in its self-examination, fierce and joyous at once."
—Marlene Cookshaw, Editor, The Malahat Review

Poetry
84 pp, 5½ x 8¾
ISBN: 1-895636-24-8
$11.95 CAN / $9.95 US

Where Words Like Monarchs Fly
Edited By George McWhirter

Where Words Like Monarchs Fly brings Mexican poetry to the fullness of its senses in English with all the music of the meaning, richness of metaphor and humour. It introduces Jose Emilio Pacheco, Gabriel Zaid, Homero Aridjis and Elsa Cross—born in the thirties and the forties—along with the fifties generation they have inspired. Covering twenty-five years of development and ten poets in full representation by each, this book is essential for understanding the immediacies of new Mexican verse. In translation by prizewinning Canadian poets Kate Braid, Sylvia Dorling, George McWhirter, Caroline Davis Goodwin, Karen Cooper, Arthur Lipman, Iona Whishaw and Raul Peschiera, the English versions have already attracted a wide readership in The New Republic, Modern Poetry in Translation, PRISM international, London Magazine and others.

"The most important assembly of Mexican poetry in translation in three decades." —This Magazine

"A testament to the vitality of poetry and the poetic spirit needed to break free from the current global paradigm of domination and exploitation."
—Books in Canada

Poetry
164 pp, 5 x 8
ISBN: 1-895636-18-3
$14.95 CAN / $11.95 US

Ivanhoe Station
By Lyle Neff

B.C. Book Prize Finalist

Ivanhoe Station is a début collection that rivets with poetic imagery as sharp as movie graphics. These poems address, in turn, social and political questions, while focussing—centrally—on a theme of transcendence.

"A quirky, vigorous and engaging collection . . . full of surprises in perception and form."
—Gary Geddes, BC Bookworld

"These poems pack a wallop. They 'steam and churn' with the energy of the city." —Lorna Crozier

Poetry
64 pp, 5 x 8
ISBN: 1-895636-16-7
$10.95 CAN / $8.00 US

Lonesome Monsters
By Bud Osborn

Lonesome Monsters is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn. Mr. Osborn's writing is as much chronicle, confession, testimony as it is poetry—an unwavering account of inner-city struggle and the tenacity of the human spirit.

By the same author: Hundred Block Rock, Oppenheimer Park

"The reader has no choice but to react physically to these poems packed with images from a world where compassion is scarce."
— Susan Musgrave Vancouver Sun

Poetry
112 pp, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN: 1-895636-08-6
$10.95 CAN / $8.00 US

Siren Tattoo
A Poetry Triptych by Isabella Legosi Mori, Angela Lee McIntyre and Heidi Greco

An 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.

" . . . poetry stripped to essentials; minimalist, yet emotionally loaded . . ." —John Moore, Vancouver Sun

Poetry
93 pp, 5 x 8
ISBN: 1-895636-04-3
$10.95 CAN / $8.00 US

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