Jason Christies Canada Post interrogates the linguistic imperatives of the communication age and investigates the links between language and nationality with dry, delirious wit. Christies poems evidence a frightening, ludic journey from the capital to the outlying punctuation where the familiarity of our nation, language and identity begin to disappear in the cracks and fades of discourse. Beware of grammar, these poems advise. Itll get you every time. Shrewdly political, wickedly funny, and fiercely intelligent, Canada Post is an important debut collection.

Canada Post

Literature & Fiction

Christie, Jason

Poetry

Invisible Publishing

the small blue: poems

MillAr, Jay

"Moments are the elements of profit." - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1
Composed primarily through the co-optation and recombination of internet search results, FAKE MATH is a poetic intervention into the ways the motive for profit structures our lives. Each poem exposes the fallacies, fake logics, and sheer idiocies that constrict our decision-making processes in terms of our art, industry, educational system, and our day-to-day lives, while questioning our tendency to resort to institutionalized social violence. FAKE MATH draws its inspiration from diverse sources from Marx to Freud, from Archimedes to Oprah, sending them all downstream on rapidly pulsating waves of schizophrenic glee and political gravity, often creating startling juxtapositions when mismatched ideas and images are torn from their original contexts. The effects are at once humorous and stomach-churning. Ultimately, these are poems about how we live, work, and play within larger structures of capitalism and how our attempts to move past these structures are largely failed attempts at rebellion, not real attempts at revolution or, better yet, escape.

Fake Math: poems

Fitzpatrick, Ryan

 The 2007 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry Winner! Thumbscrews is a poetic engagement with the aesthetics of sadomasochism and consensual pain. It employs the techniques of mannerist poetry to constrain language as ropes, cuffs, or shackles that might be used to constrain the body. Each poem can be taken as a miniature sadomasochistic encounter where language is tied up, beaten, and twisted into submission. This book abuses language; language begs for it. Thumbscrews engages with the sexual subculture of BDSM in content as well as in form. It explores the erotic 'scene' and the prevalence of role-playing in the kinky bedroom, examines various settings as 'pervertable' locations, and chronicles a series of embarrassing trips to the emergency room. Poems are shaped from the hobbled language of email, visual representations of pain, and odes to various implements. Thumbscrews is a dirty-minded, sticky-fingered book.

Thumbscrews: poems

Walschots, Natalie

Variations on Hlderlin is informed by a particular etymology of the verb "to translate": to move the dead from one place to another. The corpse in question here belongs to Friedrich Hlderlin, the schizophrenic Romantic poet subsequently canonized by such figures as Nietzsche and Heidegger. But whereas these theorists all too often arrest his corpus in order to conduct their critical autopsies, the Variations resurrect Hlderlin to the modern day, where his schizophrenic obsessions with the gods are now updated through contemporary celestial phenomena: astronauts, radio transmissions and satellites provide a new context above, while the underground churns with the sounds of subways and cloud chambers. Caught between these two levels, Hlderlin's poetry is reconfigured not through an accurate reproduction of his work, but rather through the fluidity of variations: "I am not mad / chronology just made me look that way." The Variations remind us that poetry is, above all, an ongoing conversation between the dead and the living.

Variations on Hölderlin

Hlibchuk, Geoffrey

History & Criticism

Disappointment Island

Reid, Monty

With the response to Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (2006), we decided to follow up with Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers. Because we are the capital city, Ottawa as a whole is often accused of having no identity of its own; instead, some of our strength comes from our transient nature, interacting with ideas larger and more multiple than a single base. Edited by rob mclennan, this collection features the work by Emily Falvey, Matthew Firth, Gabriela Goliger, Alison Gresik, John-James Ford, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Nadine McInnis, rob mclennan and Ian Roy.The ten authors that make up this collection highlight both the range of style and the strength of writing happening around the current City of Ottawa, ranging from roughneck prose to lyric exploration to a more straightforward kind of narrative storytelling. Rather than giving you a list of authors youve already heard of, this collection focuses on the works of authors you might not have heard of yet, some of whom have only recently came up on the national radar. These are not stories for the faint of heart.

Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets

With the response to Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (2006), we decided to follow up with Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers. Because we are the capital city, Ottawa as a whole is often accused of having no identity of its own; instead, some of our strength comes from our transient nature, interacting with ideas larger and more multiple than a single base. Edited by rob mclennan, this collection features the work by Emily Falvey, Matthew Firth, Gabriela Goliger, Alison Gresik, John-James Ford, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Nadine McInnis, rob mclennan and Ian Roy.The ten authors that make up this collection highlight both the range of style and the strength of writing happening around the current City of Ottawa, ranging from roughneck prose to lyric exploration to a more straightforward kind of narrative storytelling. Rather than giving you a list of authors you've already heard of, this collection focuses on the works of authors you might not have heard of yet, some of whom have only recently came up on the national radar. These are not stories for the faint of heart.

Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers

Contemporary

Everything is Movies

Lea, Nicholas

A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. It includes all the poems John Newlove chose for his previous Selected Poems with substantial additions from all his major collections: all of his later poetry, as well as previously excluded yet critically acclaimed works such as the long poem "Notes From And Among the Wars" and many of the cynically lyric poems that established his early reputation. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove's has been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in the words of Phyllis Webb, "doesn't struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking." Newlove was the best of us, the great line, the hidden agenda, tough as nails and yet somehow with his heart on his sleeve. There was always a double-take involved when reading his work. His lyrics, such as "The Weather" were faultless. I devoured and loved his work. - Michael OndaatjeTo call him "the voice of prairie poetry" misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton "the voice of Cromwell's London." ÉThis was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetrydelivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. ÉIt will be seen again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place. - Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove: Essays on His Works, forthcoming)

Long Continual Argument, A: The Selected Poems of John Newlove

Newlove, John

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