A summer of heavy metal, racial tension, and love a stunning debut. From the mosh pit, to the barbeque pit. From the heavy metal rack in your record store to the beat-up metal lashed to the bike rack outside. A book about tenderness and adrenalin. A book about friendship and chainsaw guitars. Ladies and gentlemen, for those with the benefit of flash photography: Titanium Punch. Yashin Blake’s remarkable debut novel is an exquisitely wrought introduction to a cast of characters  a world, in fact  that until now had no literary voice. In Titanium Punch Issac Iqbal” Khan, a devout headbanger, comes of age in a summer of beer, bikes, concerts, camping, and love. It’s a breathless take on a young man in the midst of significant personal evolution, a man coming to terms with religious intolerance and subtle racism, with bad cops and hidden agendas. A man about to fall in love. Iqbal gives you a backstage pass to the shadowy world of underground music, opening up its racial, cultural, and sexual mix to the scrutiny of many who’d prefer not to acknowledge its existence and relevance. From Pantera to jazz, from the importance of heavy metal lyrics to watching your buddy’s back, Titanium Punch pulls no punches.

Titanium Punch

Comics & Graphic Novels

Blake, Yashin

Graphic Novels

a misFit book

In the killer’s own words If an AIDS virus could talk, what would it say? How would it think? Feel? Would you want to get to know it, up close and personal? I Am Kasper Klotz is the surprising, morbidly funny autobiography that will answer all your questions. Sure, Kasper might be the face of evil, of death, but don’t let that prejudice you: get to know him. In this, his third novel, Sky Gilbert explores the culture of AIDS, exploring the minds of those whose lives revolve around the virus, the gay men who are running scared, barebacking, taking toxic drugs and raising funds for others similarly afflicted. Is Kasper Klotz an unrepentant serial killer? Or is he redeemable? When he makes the mistake of purposely infecting a beautiful young midwesterner, he’s accused, like a handful of other HIV-positive men in North America, of assault and attempted murder. A woman obsessed with Ayn Rand and her ever-expanding waistline, makes the incarcerated Kasper her mission. A hilarious, politically incorrect rant, I Am Kasper Klotz is a medical-scientific mystery: a thriller about what makes the AIDS virus tick.

I Am Kasper Klotz

Literature & Fiction

Gilbert, Sky

Literary

Skulls and crossbones: poetic piracy. Burning barns, drunken Christmases, scars, hospitals, serial killers, and, eventually, the possibilities of self-preservation and hope. The Dagger Between Her Teeth is Jennifer LoveGrove's bloodthirsty debut. Powerfully topical, it's a rare collection of poetry -- one that confronts notions of violence, both physical and emotional, by focusing on a woman's strength of will and capacity for ferocity. In The Dagger Between Her Teeth, LoveGrove resurrects and reinvents the dramatic young lives of two eighteenth-century corsairs, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Alive with the golden age of piracy but infused with the pulse of now, these poems shed more blood than a Tarantino flick. LoveGrove's work provokes with theatrical plundering, creative cross-dressing, and vicious vengeance: “Disdain reddens my blood ― I / know well I killed / my own husband and took / his clothes to be out here.” Still other poems examine the conflicting mythologies of Lilith, Adam”s first wife, who was evicted from Eden for her sexual aggression. Disputed and co-opted, Lilith has been blamed for a vast array of “deviance,” as well as for miscarriages, wet dreams, nightmares in children, and lustful women ― these poems explore the more ominous elements of her mythology. But there is also a part of The Dagger Between Her Teeth that is informed by more personal experience, from disrupted family dynamics to the failure of romance: “You’re not as fragile as you think you are; / I know you didn’t snap / any of those feathered necks / yourself. It’s all just tapeloops / and backward masking, take-out / wings and old Talking Heads albums.”

The Dagger Between Her Teeth

LoveGrove, Jennifer

Poetry

Christopher Dewdney has been working on the The Natural History for two decades. He describes it as a book about high summer, though according to his natural history the fingers of summer reach in both directions of time: as early as March and as late as November. This is a sensual book, in love not only with foliage and creatures, weather and landscape, but also with the textures of language, the rhythm of English itself; not just Anglo Saxon and Germanic, but also its southern Latin heritage blowing like a scientific sirocco up from the Mediterranean. A compendium of particulars written from the inside of its subject, The Natural History evokes the timeless moment of perception itself. And while it is set in the present, the whole geological past of the planet is represented, so that an event occurring on a summer day in current time will be juxtaposed with an event occurring during the Silurian epoch, some 440 million years ago. Revised, augmented, and presented in its entirety for the first time here, The Natural History is one of the most beautiful and erotic bodies of work this country has to offer. As Stan Dragland has commented: "The New-Old World of this long poem… is sensuously and conceptually so immediate that orgasm and epiphany are one in it. This is writing, and reading, as immersion." "There is no one else in this country… who has so persuasively chipped away at a rock face to reveal the poetry striated just beneath the surface.… These intelligent, uncompromising sensual poems are not for the rapid reader, but anyone who lingers with them a while will be amply repaid." — Quill &amp; Quire

The Natural History

Dewdney, Christopher

The decade between 1961 and 1971 was a time of tumult; of innocence lost, gained, and lost again. During those years, Ralph Osborne moved from the confusions of being 17 to, briefly, believing that at 27, he knew everything. It is, he says, "my version of the Divine Comedy  more comedic than divine." From Someplace Else is an often hilarious, occasionally tragic account of the exploration of boundaries, inner and outer, through a time of free love and psychedelic adventure. And because the paths between Heaven and Hell, good and bad, and up and down are not linear, this book is necessarily an account of one man’s first trip around the circle. Osborne’s Holy Grail is identity. His quest, in which he sets out to learn "a small piece of the puzzle  one little thing I could know for certain," takes him from a working-class tenement on the east coast, through the privileged confines of Westmount, west to the cleansing air of the prairies, and east again, to the stoned-out beginnings of Toronto-the-hip where he becomes general manager of the infamous Rochdale College. From Someplace Else is a journey driven by the ever-relevant question: to be, or to become? It’s also the slightly surreal description of the thin line between simplicity and squalor.

From Someplace Else

Biographies & Memoirs

Osborne, Ralph

Reference & Collections

This collection takes off from where Sky Gilbert’s first volume of poetry concluded and begs the question: Has Sky Gilbert grown up? Thankfully, the answer is no. Like Digressions of a Naked Party Girl, Temptations of a Juvenile Deliquent does not represent a fine literary turn by a respected man of letters, nor is it an experiment in metaphor and metonymy ripe for exegesis and respect. Instead, it’s a personal, confessional, hilarious, rant-filled thrill-ride where familiar streets are filled with gay boys, hookers, Key West sunshine, and movie stars. These are poems written on the run, between tricks, after orgies, and before that last cigarette at 4 in the morning. They are meant to be read: out loud, in bed, or simply as a tool for seduction. This dangerous book is recommended to minors, the inexperienced, the virginal, shut ins, and the sexually repressed, not University courses or best-seller lists anywhere.

Temptations for a Juvenile Delinquent

Know Your Monkey is the debut poetry collection by Toronto novelist and screenwriter Elyse Friedman. Plainspoken yet vivid, funny yet poignant, these are poems that tell stories. In Bleeding & Laughing at Pineway & Cummer’, a group of teens dizzy with spring and spirits and speed’ race a van through the suburbs after grade nine prom. In The Great Thing My Cousin George Did’, a man simultaneously drives two cars from Toronto to Hamilton: 100 yards then hop out/run back to/the other car/100 yards past the first car /and so on / and so on / with the polio / leg.’ In Paradise Mural’ we meet a woman at a Holiday Inn singles’ dance who always tried to giggle / but it came off the gangplank of her tongue / like it had been / pushed’. Friedman writes candidly about her own experiences with love, family, and work. In Screenwriting 101’, she rails against the formulaic rules that have come to govern the craft of movie-writing. In Rescue’ she fantasizes about being stranded on a desert island with Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. Never precious or inscrutable, Know Your Monkey gives us rhythmical slices of real and imagined life.

Know Your Monkey

Friedman, Elyse

Bizarre sexual parables, hilarious science fiction, fables, text-tangles, dirty stories, lush love letters, re-visionary fairy tales, predictions,strange new games, dream transcripts, and a complete handbook of absurdist instructions, including one on the dangerous arts of pig-swallowing. With all the lyricism and wit which have made his columns in NOW magazine and his Dr. Poetry segments on CBC’s Wordbeat so entertaining and provocative, this collection gathers for the first time the very best of Robert Priest's short prose. A fabulist in the tradition of Borges and Cortazar, he brings to these postcard pieces the same poignant, and twisted but brilliant sensibility which has made him one of the most entertaining and challenging poets of his generation.

How to Swallow a Pig

Priest, Robert

United States

Stories that deal with crimes that remain unsolved.

You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off

LAVERY, JOHN

Contemporary

it’s the extravagance of Vaughan’s vision, together with his lyricism and humanity, that make it possible to walk with him into the darkness, into the place where we are all alone”  Globe and Mail Ruined Stars combines a penchant for formal experimentation with a unique, often engagingly puzzling devotion to language and its limits. RM Vaughan’s third collection, Ruined Stars explores his obsession with travel, magic, and sex  each subject layered and re-layered with the confessional fictions” his poetry is famous for. Fans of Vaughan’s previous books can look forward to more baroque feats of word play, some gossipy asides, and the insights of a questioning heart.

Ruined Stars

Vaughan, RM

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