Kotsilidis's Hypotheticals is one of three debut collections published this year by Coach House, and joins a growing list of acclaimed poetic debuts in recent years from the press. Both Kate Hall (2009) and Jeramy Dodds (2008) had debut collections shortlisted for multiple awards, and both were finalists for the prestigious Griffin Prize and the Gerald Lampert Award. (Dodds also won the Trillium Award for Poetry.)Kotsilidis is currently d ...
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, Je ...
Bitar was born in Beirut, settled in Canada, studied and published in the U.S. and travelled widely, and his poetry addresses current geopolitical realities with an informed and idiosyncratic gaze. The book is firmly engaged, in complicated ways, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a look at the titles in the table of contents confirms: “Mission Creep,” “Power-Sharing Formula,” “Divide and Rule,” “Waterboarding,” “The Barricade Auction” et ...
Steudel is a court reporter in Vancouver.Steudel has worked on this manuscript in numerous contexts for several years, her mentors including the likes of Erin Moure, Jen Currin and Carolyn Forche.The publication of New Theatre continues to advance Coach House’s commitment to the best experimental and feminist writers working in any genre, including Audre Lorde Prize winner Jen Currin, Trillium Poetry Prize winner Rachel Zolf, and Governor-Genera ...
Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven't ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet. Showing an uncanny access to the voice of the rejected, unimpressive, emotionally challenged modern male, Helen Guri's debut collection explores Robert's transition from lost and lonely to loved. ...
First published in 1985, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the lone collection of poems by critic/novelist Daniel Jones (1959–1994), 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. ...
Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson applying for arts grants or the Swedish Chef reciting T. S. Eliot? Davis uses every literary form availa ...
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. «Bridesmaids,» «Day Traders,» and «Number Crunchers» are all dutifully cataloged in a series of luminously strange, compellingly original lyric and prose poems. ...
In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fatef ...