Ascend Ascend was written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals while secluded in the tower of a 100-year-old church. It is rooted in the jewish mystical tradition of merkabah literature, chronicling an ascent up the kabbalistic sefirot to witness the “chariot of god.” While traditional merkabah prose trends dry—focused on preparations for the journey while demur ...
Now that we've sold ourselves to ourselves, shuffling letters and sounds around to hide the pain, how do we represent the uncanny valley in which we've set up shop? In <i>Cursed Objects</i>, Jason Christie recoils in horror at the thoroughness of his self, then begins to write toward a new understanding brokered between all the things that define him and who he thinks he should be and interrogates how we reduce people to wo ...
Like the neutrino observatory of its title, <i>Midday at the Super-Kamiokande</i> seeks “glimpses of the obscure” to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic – road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide – or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray. These poems de ...
• Liem is the Assistant Editor of <i>Vallum Magazine</i> in Montreal, and is well connected in the poetry community.<br> •Violence against women is a lightning rod for discussion in today’s media. Liem’s book gives voice to women who die as a result of this violence, and gives them a voice instead of them being just a mere statistic.<br> ...
• bpNichol is known primarily as a poet and sound poet, but his fiction was equally innovative and influential. These works have all been out of print for years, and there's never been one place to find all of them. • bpNichol was a huge influence on a large number of writers, including his good friend Michael Ondaatje. He was an editor at Coach House for many years, and is much beloved by the whole community of avant-gar ...
Of the Subcontract is a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each of which was written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service. The collection is ordered according to cost-of-production and repurposes metadata about the efficiency of each writer to generate informatic typographic embellishments. Those one hundred poems are braced between two newly commissioned essays; the whole b ...
Juxtaposing the seemingly benign names of dead white men that litter our geographies with the details of their so-called discoveries and ‘conquests,’ Dead White Men turns ideas of exploration, finding and keeping back on themselves. Engaging with European exploration and scientific texts from the 15th to the 19th centuries, this book reexamines histories many would like to forget. ...
Featuring a series of color poems sparked by a job writing nonfiction magazine articles about synaesthesia and Fisher Price refrigerator magnets, the poems in this collection are as alive as the world from which they borrow. Besner plumbs the depths of alternative physics, glamour, economics, and virtual reality with great attention to prosody and a bleak sense of humor. ...
