“From its opening statement, ‘This Book Is a Rhizome,’ to Adebe D.A.’s ‘Poemagogy,’ to John Unrau’s ‘New Age Muskie Considers a Change of Lifestyle,’ Gulch privileges the rhetoric of (and itself exists as an example of) that ever-regenerative genre, the manifesto.”
– Andrew Dubois, University of Toronto Quarterly 80.2

“…the reliability of GULCH is the space it provides for new visions, new styles and new writers.”
– Rabble Magazine

“Gulch plays with the idea of collaboration and does it well, with a buffet of new and exciting work from today’s up and coming talent.”
– Broken Pencil Magazine

Inspired by the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose is a rhizomatic exploration of the modern Canadian literary community.

Drawing on the postmodern themes of detachment and disjuncture, GULCH seeks to create an optimistic snapshot of the pluralities and complexities that constitute the post-pomo literary landscape. Focusing on the theme of fragmentation, Steel Bananas members Sarah Beaudin, Karen Correia Da Silva and Curran Folkers have collected pieces from community artists, Professors, lit students, burgeoning young talent as well as established writers in order to compile a collection that resists the notion of wholeness, privileging instead the multiplicity and diversity found in contemporary globalized culture. This assemblage of poetry and prose bares the innovation and cultural critique of post-millennium Canadian writers, and seeks to expose the beauty of discontinuity.

Featuring work from Adebe D.A., Stephen Cain, Ewan Whyte, Spencer Gordon, Chris Felling, Matthew Hall, Daniel Tysdal, Chris Eaton & Virtual Collaborators, Amanda Lee, JJ Steinfeld, Emma Healy, Wally Keeler, Jon Eskedjian, Vincent De Freitas, Craig Alexander, Heather Babcock, Richard Rosenbaum, Jerry Levy, Alex Consiglio, Sarah Beaudin, Ursula Pflug, Kathleen Brown, Matthew Moliterni, Darryl Salach, Shannon Robinson, Miles Henry, Shannon Webb Campbell, John Unrau, Nathaniel G Moore, Zack Kotzer, Firdaus Bilimoria, Jimmy McInnes, Steph Tracey, James Arthur, Melanie Janisse, Corrigan Hammond, N Dana Jerabek, Shannon Maguire, Ryan Tannenbaum, Karen Correia Da Silva, James Papoutsis, Christopher Olsen, Alyksandra Ackerman, Curran Folkers, James Hatch, John C Goodman, Andrew McEwan, John Nyman, Mark Reble, Jamie Ross, Devon Wong, N Alexander Armstrong.

Click to read an excerpt from GULCH.

Steel Bananas is a not-for-profit art collective and culture zine. They publish a rag-bag of contemporary Canadian writers and art-bums on the 15th of each month, aiming to critically and playfully explore contemporary cultural theory and the varying facets of contemporary urban culture. They’re proud to augment all virtual content with print media or in-the-flesh art happenings around Toronto, and to support independent, alternative, and marginal art in Canada.

http://www.steelbananas.com

Carla Drysdale’s poems in Little Venus challenge the reader, tackling the hard subjects of child abuse, sexual exploitation and the failure of some families.

The character of Little Venus runs through the poems burning with rage and want in an incendiary chant that the reader can’t ignore. Little Venus is a haunting collection that will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

Click to read an excerpt from Little Venus.

Carla Drysdale was born in London, Ontario and was educated at Ryerson university in Toronto as well as Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and US journals, including the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, the Fiddlehead, Global City Review, Confrontation and LIT. She lives in Geneva, Switzerland with her husband and two sons.

“Few writers can take their own finger poppin’ rhythm and make it sound exactly like life. Nathaniel G. Moore’s filthy and pretty little dust devil made me feel slutty and happy and free. Terrific book.”
-Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything

Nathaniel G. Moore describes his third book as what would happen if he had written Brighton Rock now, in the age of Twitter.  It was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award for Best Novel.

When Maudlin City writer Charles Haas wakes up in a make-shift grave complete with windowpane roof, he realized two things: firstly, it’s a scene from one of his abandoned manuscripts, and secondly, he must stop showing his writing to strangers.

While still fresh in the dirt, Charles becomes obsessed with the city’s enfants terrible who are in the midst of plotting a demonic dance party hoax, led by the evil eighteen-year-old Shawn Michaels. Consumed by the throngs of hate-toting teens, Charles is convinced that they are  hacking themselves into a post-avatar oblivion, and that they will definitely leave him for dead.

Wrong Bar is a novel that  refuses to celebrate the wild child within, instead seeking the greater emotional truth behind the teen-aged psychodramatic passions of a deranged generation thriving in the post-sacred era.

Click to read an excerpt from Wrong Bar.

Praise for Wrong Bar

“Prepare to be hurled at breakneck speed through the brilliantly imaginative mind of one of this country’s small-press marvels.” – Edward Brown, The Globe & Mail

“It’s as if cut-up technician William S. Burroughs joined MySpace.” – Mark Medley, The National Post

Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Bowlbrawl, Let’s Pretend We Never Met, Pastels Are Pretty Much The Polar Opposite of Chalk, and co-editor of Toronto Noir.

http://www.nathanielgmoore.net

In this remarkable portrait-survey of thirty-six of Toronto’s most distinctive and influential art dealers, artist Viktor Mitic has captured and illuminated the unique individual personalities of his subjects.

Depicting by turns their passion, insouciance, vivacity, shrewdness, eccentricity, geniality, and more, these portraits successfully reflect the rainbow of human emotion and expression.

As Gary Michael Dault says in his insightful introductory essay, “there isn’t a portrait here that doesn’t provide not only a fine likeness of its subject, but also a telling, charming, incisive route into the sitter’s essential nature.”

Viktor Mitic was born in Belgrade, Serbia. A University of Toronto graduate artist, classically trained in art schools in Europe, Mitic has produced a major body of work that spans a career of over two decades. For a number of years, he was painting non-representational paintings using natural elements such as rain and hail to render surfaces of the paintings in oils on canvas. Mitic has successfully integrated various materials into his recent body of work: charcoal, graphite, oil, acrylic, watercolour, pen and ink, and japanese traditional natural pigment. He has recently developed a distinctive, some would say provocative, method; he paints portraits of international iconic images and later shoots the outline of the figures using various weapons and live ammunition. He has had many successful solo and group shows of his paintings in Europe, the United States, Canada, and, most recently, Japan. Viktor Mitic lives in Toronto.

Gary Michael Dault is a writer, painter, and art critic in Toronto. He is the author—or co-author—of a number of books, including Cells of Ourselves with artist Tony Urquhart (Porcupine’s Quill, 1989), Esko Mannikko: Mexas (Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1998), Photographs by Tom Sandberg (Astrup-Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 2000), The Prix de Rome in Architecture: A Retrospective (Coach House Books, 2006), and Captive: The Zoo Photographs of Volker Seding (Les 400 Coups, Montreal, 2007). He has published a number of books of poetry, including The Milk of Birds (Mansfield Press, 2006) and Southwester (Lyricalmyrical Press, 2007). His Handyman: New Poems is forthcoming from the Black Moss Press. A limited edition of his Hebdomeros Suite—with watercolours by David Bolduc—is forthcoming from Coach House Books. Dault has written widely about contemporary art in Canada in journals such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Parkett, and ARTNews. He contributes the weekly art-review column, “Gallery Going,” to the Globe and Mail, and has written innumerable catalogue essays for galleries and museums. As a practicing artist, Dault has exhibited frequently, most recently at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, Gallery Page & Strange in Halifax, and the Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Ontario. Upcoming in 2010, he has exhibitions at Index G in Toronto and Modern Fuel in Kingston, Ontario. Among his writings for television is the six-hour mini-series, Inside the Vatican with Sir Peter Ustinov (1993). His writings for the stage include Alice in the Orchestra (with composer Gene Di Novi, 2005), The Goal (with composer Eric Robertson, 2003), and, also with Eric Robertson, Hauntings for Orchestra (2007).

Praise for the paintings of Viktor Mitic:

“Provocative art with religious connotations.”
—Peter Goddard, Toronto Star

“Serious painting, but it’s fun . . . there is levity to it.”
—Terry Graff, Telegraph Journal

[He's] taken . . . an iconic religious image and used a gun on it . . . What next?
—Mark Coles, BBC

Poems that are like incantations, love spells spoken in a young lyrical voice.

These poems are an existential exploration of love and mortality via fairytales and nature.

Travelling freely among the shattered confines of identity and gender, travel and environment, the dreamlike narrative unfolds in lyric language, telling of love lost and found, and mythologies that inform the journey with passages in the rhythm of fairytales.

Click to read an excerpt from Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse.

Phoebe Tsang was born in Hong Kong, grew up in England and currently resides in Canada. She is the author of the poetry collection Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse (Tightrope Books), due to be launched 05 November 2009. Phoebe’s poetry can be found in the anthologies Garden Variety (Quattro Books) and Not a Muse (Haven Books). Journal credits include Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong), Atlas02 (UK & India), Brand (UK), Room and  Freefall (Canada). Her chapbooks are Solitaires (Lyricalmyrical Press, 2006) and To Kiss the Ground (Press On! 2007). A professional violinist, she is a multi-genre artist who holds a BSc in Architecture from the University of London.

The poems in Bone Dream are darkly sensuous, capturing the unspoken moments of life through images firmly grounded in the body and the material world.

Relationships, family and death are explored at times through the medium of a dancers body, and at other times through the everyday artifacts we find around us. These poems move, disturb and bring us to realization.

Click to read an excerpt from Bone Dream.

Moira MacDougall is the assistant poetry editor of The Literary Review of Canada. She has had poems published in literary magazines and journals across the country. This is her first book length collection.

From a long list drawn from Canadian literary journals and magazines, award-winning poet A.F. Moritz, the volume’s guest editor, has chosen 50 of the best Canadian poems published in 2008.

With this anthology, readers, often baffled by proliferating poems and poets, will be able to tap into the remarkable and vibrant Canadian poetry scene, checking out the currents – and cross currents – of poetry in a volume distilled by a round robin of distinguished editorial taste.

Featuring work from Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison, Ken Babstock, Shirley Bear, Tim Bowling, Asa Boxer, Anne Compton, Jan Conn, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Don Domanski, John Donlan, Tyler Enfield, Jesse Ferguson, Connie Fife, Adam Getty, Steven Heighton, Michael Johnson, Sonnet L’Abbe, Anita Lahey, M Travis Lane, Evelyn Lau, Richard Lemm, Dave Margoshes, Don McKay, Eric Miller, Shane Neilson, Peter Norman, David O’Meara, PK Page, Elise Partridge, Elizabeth Philips, Meredith Quartermain, Matt Rader, John Reibetanz, Robyn Sarah, Peter Dale Scott, Cora Sire, Karen Solie, Carmine Starnino, John Steffler, Ricardo Sternberg, John Terpstra, Sharon Thesen, Matthew Tierney, Patrick Warner, Tom Wayman, Patricia Young, Changming Yuan, and Jan Zwicky.

Click to read an excerpt from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009.

About the guest editor:
A native of Niles, Ohio, A.F. Moritz has lived in Toronto since graduating from Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1974. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto. His poetry has received the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as Canada Council, Guggenheim Foundation and Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowships. He has translated books by Ludwig Zeller including In the Country of the Antipodes: Selected Poems 1964 – 1979 and The Ghost’s Tattoos.

About the series editor:
Molly Peacock is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, published by Penguin Canada, and by W.W. Norton in the US and UK. She is the Poetry Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. Before she emigrated to Canada in1992, she was one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on the Buses and Subways in New York City, and she served as an early advisor to Poetry On The Way. Peacock is also the author of a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece, published by McClelland and Stewart, and of a book about poetry, How To Read A Poem & Start A Poetry Circle, also published by M & S. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Globe and Mail. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the TLS. Recently she toured with her one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge produced by the London, Ontario based company, Femme Fatale Productions. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael Groden, an English Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Her website is: mollypeacock.org.