A daring and innovative collection of new poems by the controversial author of Paul’s Case and VillainElle. Missing Children is a daring and innovative collection of new poems by the controversial author of Paul’s Case and VillainElle. Here, Lynn Crosbie creates a bold fusion of genres by taking traditional elements of the novel – dialogue, plot, and description – and weaving them through a series of narratively linked poems. Centering on a man and a woman obsessively drawn to each other, Missing Children unfolds around a forbidden relationship and a series of letters, written by the protagonist, to the parents of missing children. Infused with psychological insight, rich in cultural iconography, and written in spare, clear language, Missing Children takes us to the moral fringes of society and challenges us to judge what we find. Crosbie breaks new stylistic and dramatic ground in this compelling, original collection.

Missing Children

Humor & Entertainment

Crosbie, Lynn

Humor

MCCLELLAND STEWART

Poet, novelist, and journalist, Lynn Crosbie brings her unique voice to the forefront of the Canadian poetry canon with this important collection of verse. Hers is a world of Shakespeare, skinheads and centurions; and hers is a life stripped down to the basics and then reconstructed, slowly, with relish, every brick scrutinized meticulously. In Queen Rat her language is urban, but her soul is universal as she explores that which makes up everything.

Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

House of Anansi Press

A book-length narrative poem, this sassy, confessional, intoxicating, and heartbreaking work charts the ups and downs of a torrid love affair. From illusions of permanence and ownership to the pain of estrangement, Liar masterfully explores feelings familiar to anyone who has ever loved and lost. Crosbie also goes beyond this territory, examining the lover’s own complicity in her joy and suffering. Liar is a grotesque, beautiful meditation on the nature of love.

Liar: A Poem

The Corpses of the Future is a sustained, confessional new collection of poems by Lynn Crosbie. It tells the story of her father’s battle with frontotemporal dementia and blindness, following a stroke. The poems chronologically recount the poet’s conversations and time with her father, and capture his still-astonishing means of communicating. The book’s title is his, sardonic, remark. Crosbie considers, strategically, dementia to be a symbolic language and as such, similar to poetry. The author’s attempts to understand her father’s distress, pain, fear, and brave love are assisted by her understanding of the negative capability” required of readers of poetry. This is a harrowing book, with moments of joy and even levity. It is a collection of poetry about love, and love’s persistence, even under the most unspeakable circumstances.

The Corpses of the Future

Set in lesser known parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his orgiastic fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out. The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its unlikely denouement and manage to wrest each other, however briefly, from their dizzying spirals of decline. But when Parnell is offered the chance to perform in the sequel to Ultraviolence, the feature film that made him famous, and to work again with its brilliant but merciless director, he and Annabel are forced to confront their demons as the extreme and fleeting world of fame threatens to divide them.

Chicken

Humor & Satire

"The dense hermeticism in Eyre's vision generates a fascinating journey for the viewer, rewarded with a glimpse into a very complex psyche. A magnificent body of work." —Canadian Art
Known for the theatricality of her self-portraits and the doubles that populate her images, disrupting the fixity of identity, Janieta Eyre is one of Canada's most original, provocative, and internationally recognized photographers. Spanning her seven major series (1993–2013), Incarnations is the first collection to make accessible a representative body of her work, including contributions by prominent Canadian writers and artists.

Incarnations: The Photography of Janieta Eyre

Arts & Photography

Bök, Christian

Eyre, Janieta

Dorenbaum, David

Photography & Video

Coach House Books

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are a repository of a seven-year period in the author's life; they are also a gymnasium where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks. Deft with matters both low- and highbrow (here are stories about '80s big-hair bands and the lasting, theological value of the Rocky series; here, too are stories contemplating critical theory and fine art), Life Is About Losing Everything speaks with manic yet grave authority about risking and losing everything, and then sorting through the remains to discover what is beautiful, what is trash, and what, ultimately, belongs.

Life Is About Losing Everything

Literary

Originally published in 1998, Lynn Crosbie brought her unique voice to the forefront of Canadian poetry with this important collection of verse. Hers is a world of Shakespeare, skinheads, and centurions; and hers is a life stripped to the basics and then reconstructed with relish, every brick scrutinized meticulously. In Queen Rat her language is urban, but her soul is universal as she explores that which makes up everything.

Queen Rat (A List)

A-LIST

Does true love have supernatural power? Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain. Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed. Her mother is an alcoholic grunge relic from Seattle, whose recollections, books and music help ignite Evelyn's love for Cobain-a love so painfully strong that it summons the deceased singer to her side. When Evelyn is taken to the hospital after an overdose, she awakens to find Cobain-who has little to no memory of his former life-convalescing in the bed beside her. Once united, they quickly become addicted to drugs and each other. Cobain-renamed Celine Black-and Evelyn escape the hospital and run off together, determined to have everything they want. Inevitably, they become infamous musicians, but despite their mutual devotion, the couple is tormented by strong passion and jealousy. As their celebrity grows, their relationship becomes more excessive, and an episode of sexual violence explodes, shockingly, into murder. A highly original work of haute fan fiction, written in Crosbie's poetic and emotionally evocative prose, Where Did You Sleep Last Night is an imaginative, surprisingly funny, and touching novel about the adamant persistence of love.

Where Did You Sleep Last Night

“A triumph, a contemporary satyrican.”—D.A. Powell
This three-way, groundbreaking, e-mail deconstruction of All About Eve is a treasure-trove of poetic forms, cinephile gossip and literary visitations.

Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse

Trinidad, David

Conway, Jeffery

Contemporary

Turtle Point Press

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Books by Crosbie, Lynn