From critically acclaimed poet and novelist Jim Nason comes a collection of vivid and affecting stories about the brief moments that change lives.

The characters in these eleven stories live in a world upside down. From the young professional who leaves her high-powered job to explore street life as a graffiti artist, to the gay man who falls in love with a woman, to the spin class fanatic who learns that there’s a fine line between fitness and addiction, these excessive and radical characters create pandemonium wherever they go.

Inspired by everyday people riding the TTC, Jim Nason has crafted a collection of gender- and expectation-bending stories that reveal the extraordinary and often heartbreaking truths behind ordinary life.

Poignant and uplifting, The Girl on the Escalator is a fresh look at the world right outside our door.

Praise for The Girl on the Escalator:

“With an unflinching eye—and evoking ‘lapsed’ territories of Raymond Carver and Norman Levine—Jim Nason guides us artfully, and with cutting-edge wit, through a marginalized world whose quiet, devastating terror is that it may be our own . . . Tough, acutely observed, and tender, the stories in this collection bear the hallmark of a prodigious downtown seer whose unforgettable voice is distinctly his own. A gem of a work.”
—Royston Tester, author of Summat Else

“Nason’s well-drawn characters push themselves to the limit, whatever the limit, and keep going. One excellent story after another, original and very polished. His descriptions and dialogue are right on target—Nason is a terrifically good writer.”
—Elisavietta Ritchie, author of In Haste I Write You This Note: Stories and Half-Stories

Praise for The Housekeeping Journals:

“Nason offers readers a glimpse into characters who are bitter and wise, funny and dignified . . . gorgeously and with grace, glimpses into the beautifully fought lives and deaths of his characters.”
—Mary Horodyski, Prairie Fire

About the Author

Jim Nason’s award-winning poems and stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies across the United States and Canada, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 & 2010. He has published two books of poetry: If Lips Were as Red (Palmerston Press) and The Fist of Remembering (Wolsak and Wynn); a third collection, Narcissus Unfolding, is forthcoming from Frontenac House. His debut novel, The Housekeeping Journals, was released to critical acclaim by Turnstone Press in 2007. He lives in Toronto.

A startling and original new voice that owes as much to Black Flag and Bikini Kill as it does to J.D. Salinger and Heather O’Neill.

A South African copywriter is transplanted to the urban jungle of Manhattan. A recovering rape victim tries to resume a normal life. A Toronto nurse cuts herself to fill her emptiness. In Got No Secrets, Danila Botha takes us into the private lives of twelve different women, with only one question in mind: What if these women were you? From addiction to abuse, from childhood to suicide, from Hillbrow, Johannesburg, to downtown Toronto, Botha’s prose is compassionate, provocative, often funny, and always fearless.

Praise for Got No Secrets

“Intensely original and fantastically written.”
-Lydia, The Literary Lollipop

Click here to read an excerpt from Got No Secrets.

Danila Botha was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She volunteered with Na-me-res, an organization benefiting the homeless, which inspired many of the stories in Got No Secrets. Her writing has appeared in 24 Hours, Yoink! Magazine, and NOW. She lives in Halifax.

Ian Burgham once again presents poems of compassion that celebrate all manner of the heartland’s hazards and risks.

In his third collection of poetry, The Grammar of Distance, Ian Burgham writes from his gut and his heart. His imagery is, by turns, sensuous and rough-hewn, soft and hard. The poems crackle with sonic energy; they whinny and stamp. They whistle in the dark. His poetic landscapes frequent the windswept coasts of Scotland; but in this collection, we also find him doing terribly Canadian things like snowshoeing, surveying, chopping wood. Sometimes Al Purdy can be heard in Burgham’s voice and, occasionally, Patrick Lane. His penchant for storytelling and Celtic elegiac moods makes him a solid candidate for the position of poetic counterpart to Alistair MacLeod. Like all strong poets, Burgham’s imagination breaks past borders. Tribal and intense, his poems are conversations with loved ones, lost ones, and all the poets with storms in their bones. They are feisty. They rant. They grieve. They celebrate. Burgham is a thinker, a philosophical poet, a restless soul who asks big questions.

Click to read an excerpt from The Grammar of Distance.

Ian Burgham is an associate of the League of Canadian Poets. Born in New Zealand, raised in Canada, he has lived and worked for extended periods of time in both New Zealand and Scotland. He studied literature at Queen’s University and at the University of Edinburgh. He worked as an editor for Canongate Publishing and later became publisher of Macdonald Publishing in Edinburgh. He has previously published two collections of poetry, A Confession of Birds, a chapbook published in the UK in 2004, and The Stone Skippers, published in 2007 by Tightrope Books and nominated for the 2008 Relit Award. He currently divides his time between Toronto and Kingston. In 2004-5 Burgham won the Queen’s University “Well-Versed” Poetry Award. His work has been published in many Canadian literary journals including Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2), The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, Queen’s Quarterly, dANDelion, Harpweaver, Precipice, Jones Avenue, and Ascent Aspirations.

Praise for The Stone Skippers:

“… a voice you don’t want to miss.” —Di Brandt

“ … concision, leanness and directness …”—A.F. Moritz

“rare and remarkable … the work of one who has the ear for the possibilities of language …”—Alexander McCall Smith

Ian’s poetry has also been integrated into jewelery by artist Jeanine Payer. View the beautiful creations on Jeanine’s website: www.jeaninepayer.com

“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