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"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.

"e;Queyras' novel scores the jagged incisions of childhood. How her characters escape or embrace or succumb to the damage, she manages through an exquisite prose that cannot comfort them, nor ease us. Yes we cannot help but be held by the language."e;Dionne Brand Five siblings, all haunted by the death of a brother in their youth. One winter day, when another of them will be taken by cancer. Guddy is struggling to fly across the continent in a snowstorm to see her sister while she still can. Jerry, avoiding the phone, hits the highway, driving as fast as he can away from his back pain and his son. Bjarne, just back from six years on the streets, is watching Judge Judy, trying to quiet the voices in his head. Annie is cleaning her mother's trailer and ducking her questions. And then there's Therese, trying to forgive them all before it's too late. As all five are forced to reactor to choose to not reactto the news of Therese's impending death, their actions weave a nuanced portrait of a family, of the devastating reach of childhood grief. What if thinking is all we have at the end of the day? This transcendent first novel from award-winning poet Sina Queyras tells the story of childhood by recreating the mind at work grappling with it: noticing, reaching, loving, and flailing. Sina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

"e;A great novel that captures the loneliness and absurdity of the 1990s suburban experience. Dense and imaginative writing that often borders on the uncomfortable, but the edge of your seat is the best place to be."e;Joel Plaskett It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family is leading an ordinary suburban existence. Former childhood volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife, Trixie, serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful journal for genocide studies. Their son Owen has just returned from juvenile prison to the vast horrors of high school. Heath, Parker's brother, has vowed to cut down on the weed and fried chicken for a regimen of self-improvement, obeying his AbDestroyer routine and crafting a screenplay that will dismantle the universe. All appears normal. Yet in the summer's swelter, as Y2K anxiety grows, grim truths are revealed. Trixie is rocked by the discovery of an undiagnosable cerebral defect, rendering her toils at the journal trivial. Cataloging crunches and ignoring his Gulf War vet ex-girlfriend, Heath fights to reconcile confusions of the past with hopes for a meaningful future. Owen's religious fixations feed his Robitussin binges and fantasies of self-destruction. And while peddling his wares at the annual Empowerment Expo, Parker forges an uneasy friendship with Adam, an African political refugee harboring his own violent aspirations. Sprawling yet scalpel-sharp, Maintenance, like some twenty-first-century White Noise, takes the suburbs to a geography you won't quite recognize. Rob Benvie has recorded and performed with the rock bands Thrush Hermit, Camouflage Nights, and The Dears. He is the author of the novel Safety of War.

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.

Science is a useful metaphor for understanding our lives, but it is often shown to be as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. This lively, thoughtful, and refreshingly speculative debut collection turns scientific method around to question science's faith in certainty, exploring the alternate meaning of "e;hypothetical"e; as something that is merely "e;supposed to be true."e; Under the poet's wide-angled, open-hearted gaze, scientific investigation begins to mirror the dark art of poetry, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves one minute, then abruptly throwing everything into question.Leigh Kotsilidis lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she works as a freelance graphic designer while completing her MFA in studio arts.

"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.

More than ever, non-profits need to be smart, efficient businesses. This book will help them get there.

First published in 1985, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the lone collection of poems by critic/novelist Daniel Jones (19591994), was a cult hit. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones' depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible.

A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People is not your average reference book. It turns a series of sociological case studies into a functional encyclopedia that doubles as an achingly funny collection of poems. "e;Bridesmaids,"e; "e;Day Traders,"e; and "e;Number Crunchers"e; are all dutifully cataloged in a series of luminously strange, compellingly original lyric and prose poems.

Match's touching, whip-smart poems chart the limits of the mind/body relationship in decidedly virtual times.

Praise for Sean Dixon:Energetic. . . . Full of sound and fury.Kirkus ReviewReminiscent of the kind of irrepressibly mischievous and literary novels that John Barth used to write. Call it populist poindexterism.Quill & Quire It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her boyfriend's dead body and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man's father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, being so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnant.But that's not the end of it. You see, there's some kind of connection between Kip and this rich developer's son that keeps them tight in one another's orbit. So when Kip awakens from her grief, intent on revenge, they find themselves pursuing one another with a ferocity they can barely understand, one that spirals outward, with subway accidents and arson and drainpipes and backhoe wars, to envelop roommates, two guilty fathers, a window-cleaner or two, landlords, family secrets, a Vietnamese gangster, a stand-up bass player and an activist tour guide. And concluding in the subterranean heart of Toronto itself, which, like Kip, is torn between vengefulness and growth.Sean Dixon is a novelist, playwright, and banjo player. He's the author of the novel The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal; two novels for young readers, The Feathered Cloak and The Winter Drey; and several plays, including those collected in AWOL: Three Plays for Theatre SKAM.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Furro-Grumley Award for LGBT FictionShortlisted for the 2012 W.O. Mitchell Award for Best Calgary FictionShortlisted for the 2012 Georges Bugnet Award for Alberta FictionLonglisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller PrizePraise for Suzette Mayr:Venous Hum never fails to impress. Brash, macabre, and irreverent, its the kind of story you want to hear from a latter-day Scheherazade: so intoxicating you crave more.Vancouver SunA seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him.His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend's girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student's name, that she could care more about her students than her ex's new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counselor, Walter, feels guiltymaybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the school. And Walter, who's secretly been in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that's a little callous. He's also tired of Max's obsession with some sci-fi show on TV. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster.And then Max meets a drag queen named Crepe Suzette. And everything changes.Suzette Mayr is the author of three previous novels: Moon Honey, The Widows, and Venous Hum. The Widows was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region, and has been translated into German. Moon Honey was shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. Suzette Mayr lives and works in Calgary, Alberta.

It's the summer of 1969, and as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the family cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 30 hits, avoiding her cousins and plotting to save the bear caged at the top of March Road. When Fenelon Falls will take you to a time and place that was never as idyllic as it seemed.

Local Motion presents an in-depth analysis of civic engagement in Canada's largest metropolis.

In a world where hilarity and heartbreak are next-door neighbours, minor complications inevitably arise.

Jonathan Ball's Clock?re is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce - plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience or the laws of physics are de?led. The poems in a sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both 'clocks' and '?re' and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus 'happenings,' but replace the casual aesthetic and DIY simplicity of Fluxus art with something more akin to the brutality of Artaud's theatre of cruelty. Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball's 'plays' break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category to revel in their own dazzling, magni?cent horror.

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.

With links to intense poetic works like John Berrymans Dream Songs, Gilbert Sorrentinos Corrosive Sublimate and Erin Moures Furious, Jon Paul Fiorentinos new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads and associations that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience: 'All roads, side roads/all text, signage/All seasons, autumn/ all memories, winter.'The poems here build on Derridas ideas about the psychological implications of memory and the archival impulse and on philosopher Charles Sanders Peirces semiotics of 'the index.' Indexical Elegies is a rich, emotionally charged work that showcases Fiorentinos talents at their feisty, engaged best. From its Post-Prairie pamphleteering and its comic Montreal musings to its moving elegies, this is provocative poetry that never loses touch with the readers pleasure.

Pompoms, blackberries and Value Village: Take a stroll through the thoughts of one of Canada's most intriguing poets and thinkers.

Exploring the phonic alphabets of shorthand and Unifon as image, Rhapsodomancy playfully interrogates the relationship between voice and visual poetry.

In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned, and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer, and the erosion of personal rights fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal.

A virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs, Neighbour Procedure sees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed from a cast of unlikely neighbours, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman and two women at the gym.

Night is falling, and so is the snow. As the blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes, and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made.Julies two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to be famous when she suddenly finds herself, at forty-six, unexpectedly expectant. Shes not sure she can bear to be a mother again. And her husband, Charlie, wont come home to talk it over with her.Charlie wants another child more than anything, but he doesnt know how to deal with Julie. His affair with Wilson, his best friend, is over, but hes found a different and unusual kind of intimacy.Wilson works in the Singer factory that keeps the town alive. She wants more than anything to be loved, but she knows that Charlie wasnt the way to get there. Shes in love with Dol.Dol is a transsexual, a divorced father of two children, who cant afford the transition that would make his body make sense although the doctors visiting from Atlanta might change that.Their very different voices converge as the blizzard gathers force, their stories violently mapping in the snow the ways that memory, gender, and history carve themselves upon our bodies. The Drifts is dexterously told, a cacophony of four affecting voices melding into one exquisite chord.

Told in a stark, minimalist voice, Isobel and Emile is the hypnotizing story of two lovers without each other. It is about staying true to what they hold dear, no matter that it is hopeless and that nothing will ever come of it, because sometimes that is all that is left. And sometimes, it is enough.

'Derry specializes in the most delightfully self-unaware characters. These are delicious portrayals of delusion.' Uptown'Derry's cohort of misanthropic, sexually repressed anti-heroes possesses a spooky ability to get under your skin.' Prairie Fire'Arrestingly witty.' Vue WeeklyThe return of a former lover saps a retired librarians faith in punctuation; a judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy; and the glories of market analysis prove as deceptive as human connection when Trevor Spates visit to a stripper goes awry. Meanwhile, poor Tim Pine must face his coprophobia in a most public and lamentable office misadventure.Sentimental Exorcisms is a collection of tragicomic satire, latter-day-Victorian collisions of Nabokov and Proust. The men in these long short stories have grand designs and petty fears, or modest designs and grand fears. Desires, scapegoats, idylls, and obtrusive egos: the golden calves they cant quite bear to kill. With their ramparts crumbling around them, each mounts an exuberant defence in a vacuum of self-absorption.David Derry lives in Toronto. Having been seduced by farming, boat-building, and chauffeuring, and having flirted with academia, he more recently discovered the insular pleasure of drafting and amending contracts, where we find him today, working as a legal assistant. Sentimental Exorcisms is his first book.

Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Halls bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poets antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves. As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps. Taken together, they present the argument that to truly 'know' something, one must first recognize its traces in something else.

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrooks second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrooks poems dont use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure.

Trace the diverse networks, influences, dialogues, dialectics, and interventions that make Canada's women writers a powerful force in avant-garde literature.

Longlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Lemon is the story of a teenaged girl with the numbers against her.

These essays form a saucy picture of how Toronto sustains itself, from growing basil on balconies to four-star restaurants.