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Like I Care – Stephen Guppy
ISBN 9781926639536
Price: $21.95
Like I Care is set in Vancouver a year or two into the future, when everything is just like it is now, apart from the invasion of monsters from Japanese Horror movies, the frequent earthquakes, and the army of scooter-riding Yé-Yé girls taking over the streets. The characters include a couple of families who live in an upscale suburb. Arnold is a struggling real-estate agent who is going through a divorce from Katherine, who believes she is Princess Diana. Their daughter, Christiana, is an aspiring model. Lawrence, their neighbour, has retired from his civil service career and is now a consultant who specializes in writing pointless mission statements. He’s plotting an affair with a young woman who belongs to a cannibal cult led by a chef who has created the perfect Canadian cuisine—eating the corrupt. Lawrence’s blended family includes Dorothy, his wife, and her son Thomas, who has dropped out of university and discovered that his true vocation is watching daytime TV. They’re all about to be transformed through the influence of legendary New-Age financier and evangelist of globalization Mitchell Mobius. Thomas becomes his evil twin, Raoul, and joins Mobius in founding a company that markets obsolete trends. Christiana is transformed into a media icon without her knowledge or consent. Arnold also jumps on the Mitchell Mobius bandwagon and finds himself in Taiwan just in time for the invasion. Fear, uncertainty, disinformation: that’s the mantra of the 21st century, and Arnold and his friends are living it to the hilt.
Praise for Stephen Guppy’s first novel, The Fire Thief:
“…a masterful piece of storytelling, with well-drawn characters and imagined situations that seem all too real”. The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
“Guppy sharply evokes character and milieu in dialogue and prose that are skillfully-shaped.” The Vancouver Sun
Praise for Stephen Guppy’s stories:
“Stephen Guppy’s The Work of Mercy…collects the work of a writer with an impressive and under-appreciated oeuvre.…His new collection brings together nine stories of remarkable intensity that have been previously published in journals and collections. Like Dianne Arbus’ photography, which influenced some of Guppy’s finest poems, these stories demonstrate a keen eye for the freakish and outré that always lurk at the not-so-distant margins of the everyday world”. Canadian Literature
“Stephen Guppy has a remarkable talent”. Monday Magazine
Stephen Guppy is the author of several books including The Fire Thief (novel) The Work of Mercy (stories) Understanding Heaven (poems) which was shortlisted for the BC Book Award/Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry.
Come Late to the Love of Birds – Sandra Kasturi
ISBN 9781926639512
Price: $16.95
Sandra’s first collection, The Animal Bridegroom featured an introduction by Neil Gaiman and has sold out. This collection expands on her themes of abject romances, deformed fairytales gone and the astonishing delights of life in glorious 21st century. Her latest poetry book fuses nature’s continuous emotional offerings, our desire to understand ourselves with our passion to be free, devoid of the burden of modern thought.
Sandra Kasturi is a writer, publisher, book reviewer and Bram Stoker Award-winning editor. She is the co-owner of the World Fantasy Award-nominated press, ChiZine Publications. She managed to snag an introduction from Neil Gaiman for her previous poetry collection, The Animal Bridegroom (Tightrope Books). She lives in Toronto with her husband, writer and publisher Brett Alexander Savory.
Praise for Come Late to the Love of Birds
“Kasturi catapults her readers into a parallel universe where dreams shape reality. Beware! She’s a powerful trickster who infuses the everyday with beauty, lust, changelings and not-so-benevolent magic.”
—Emily Pohl-Weary, author of Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl
“Sandra Kasturi’s poetry collection, Come Late to the Love of Birds, is a dazzling journey through a mind awake, an eye alive, and a voice remarkably adept. There is great music here, and magic, and many impossible things you didn’t believe before you read them.”
—Patrick O’Leary, author of The Gift and The Black Heart
“Sandra Kasturi’s poems in Come Late to the Love of Birds manage to have both the charm of a particularly beautiful and bright child, while at the same time the grinning bite of a bad seed. A sympathy for roasting birds, a send-up of mythology, the haunted dignity of a hawk—everything she writes has a touch of melancholy about it, but it’s the toy melancholy of the curious and optimistic. How I’d love to be a subject in her world. These poetic tales are funny, absurd, sad, portentous, and completely brilliant. I shall look twice when I next see a bird. I too, have come late to the love of birds—but now I adore them.”
—Susie Moloney, author of A Dry Spell and The Thirteen
Praise for The Animal Bridegroom
“The Animal Bridegroom is a wonderful showcase for Sandra Kasturi’s work—she has a lot to say and hundreds of ways to say it. Filled with poetry of sheer, spinning invention and genuine passion, none of it comfortable or conventional, this long-awaited book is a genuine pleasure to read.”
—Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter and Mrs. God
“Sandra Kasturi’s magical poems transform the ordinary into the surreal and exotic.”
—Phyllis Gotlieb, author of Birthstones and Red Blood, Black Ink, White Paper
“The Animal Bridegroom is to be revelled in as though you were wandering in a zoo of the most outlandish creatures, stopping often to watch and wonder at their strange behaviour.”
—Adam Getty, author of Repose and Lyric and Elegy
Best Canadian Essays 2012
ISBN 9781926639567
Price: $19.95
Unique and informative, these essays take a hard look at the state of Canadian literature today by exploring independent publishing, the awards culture, and the commercialization of even the most un-commercial of books. Delving into the political issues driving Canadians, including the tar sands in Alberta and the future of the railway system, this collection also discusses timely topics such as sexuality in the cyber world, the ongoing discoveries of the science world, and immigration. With contributions from Ryan Bigge, Kim Fu, George Fetherling, Alexandra Molotkow and Stephen Henighan, this volume promises to be one on the most entertaining and thought provoking edition yet.
Christopher Doda is an award-winning critic, editor, and poet. He is the author of the collections of poetry Among Ruins and Aesthetics Lesson. His poems and reviews have appeared in journals and magazines across Canada and he was an editor at Exile: The Literary Quarterly for five years. He is currently the review editor for the online journal Studio.
Ray Robertson is the author of six novels—Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food, Gently Down the Stream, What Happened Later, and David—as well as two collections of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing and, most recently, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, which was short-listed for the Hillary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, long-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2011.
Dirty Bird – Keir Lowther
ISBN 9781926639529
Price: $21.95
CBC Literary Award finalist Keir Lowther makes his debut with a novel that revolves around loved ones dead and alive, family or otherwise that haunts the modern psyche of one young boy, trapped in the grotesque world that surrounds him. Written in a creepy, deadpan, dark spiritual tone that will light a powder keg in the lukewarm waters of Canadian fiction. Dirty Bird is a family dystopia saga of anxiety and misplaced love, carved out in the spirit of spooky tradition of writers such as Tony Burgess, Joey Comeau and Lisa Foad.
“Keir Lowther’s Dirty Bird gets between your teeth. It leaves silt in your bed sheets and second-hand smoke in your hair. It’s a neo-Canadian gothic tale of dysfunction, hallucination, and denial. It will make you feel sick, weak all over, but you’ll love it. You’ll crawl around for days after finishing it, wishing for more. This book breaks into your brain – but you’ll have to read it to know what that really means.”
- Liz Worth author of Treat Me Like Dirt
“This debaucherous debut from Keir Lowther does not deal in pig-tailed orphans or raspberry cordial. Instead it delivers a darkly gothic PEI—made of grit, grime, and grotesquerie—in which the wronged dead crawl from their graves to track mud across your clean kitchen floor. Dirty Bird is a devilish, desperate plea from one very disturbed little boy who spends his summer longing for Happy Meals and coming of age among adults with human hearts and savage, animalistic appetites. This book reminds you of every bad thing you ever did and shames you for it. Dirty Bird will raze your brain and haunt your dreams and leave you begging for more.”
– Matthew J. Trafford, author of The Divinity Gene
Keir Lowther lives in Prince Edward Island with his wife, daughter and dog. His great grandfather was Lucy Maud Montgomery’s first cousin.
Best Canadian Poetry 2012
ISBN 9781926639550
Price: $19.95
Continuing in a long-established tradition of poetry excellence, this collection of 50 poems is culled from Canadian literary magazines and journals. The handpicked selection includes the best, and most current, representations of the vibrant Canadian poetry scene. This distinguished volume offers both a convenient introduction to contemporary poets in Canada and a collectible yearbook for seasoned poetry readers, distilled by the esteemed editorial tastes of a new guest editor and an accomplished poetry editor.
Molly Peacock, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010) and six books of poetry, including The Second Blush (2008) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (2002). Among her other works are a memoir called Paradise, Piece By Piece (1998) and How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle (1999). She is the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (2001) and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses (1996).
Carmine Starnino has published four critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including This Way Out (2009), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. His other books include A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), a collection of reviews and essays, and The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005), which he edited. His most recent book is Lazy Bastardism: Essays and Reviews on Contemporary Poetry (2012). Starnino lives in Montreal, where he is poetry editor for Vehicule Press and a senior editor for Reader’s Digest Canada.
“Bravo: a Canadian first. Tightrope Books releases its first annual roundup of poetry from Canadian journals, revealing what poets are up to in their proverbial basements, garrets and broom closets from coast to coast to coast. Buy it, or borrow it, but do read it.” – Arc Poetry Annual, Paul Tyler
“The collection is a unique glimpse at a diversity of poets, from Ottawa’s David O’Meara to Margaret Atwood to the revered P.K. Page.”—Cormac Rae, Ottawa Xpress
