Monster is a poetry collection that Pandora would want to open, containing poems that Eve would bite into.

In a sophomore collection that is bound to cause a stir, David Livingstone Clink takes you on a journey into the belly of the beast, a journey that is both dark and surreal, strange and unusual, a departure from the safe neighbourhoods where people don’t lock their doors at night. But all is not dark! There are the unusual and surreal places that bend your mind, that make you look at things you thought you knew but in a different light, and there is humour. But there is also elder abuse, infidelity, molestation, murder, suicide, serial killers and shapeshifters, six-legged dogs and bodies hanging from barn rafters, spiderwebs and fallen cities, steampunk airships muscling into the night, and always the shadows helping us define our shape, how we feel, and, ultimately, who we are.

Click to read an excerpt from Monster.

Praise for Eating Fruit Out of Season

“When I picked up Eating Fruit out of Season, Clink’s first full-length poetry collection, I expected mostly to laugh and be amused. Instead, I felt nearly the entire spectrum of human emotion. Clink writes with an earnest necessity I didn’t know was in him.”
—Jacob Scheier, Prairie Fire

“Clink’s debut suggests the possibility of a less isolated and obscure voice for the contemporary poet.”
—Maurice Mierau, Winnipeg Free Press

“Nowhere in Canadian poetry will the prosaic mind discover verse so barbed and ironic as in this text, while inspired intellects must find it a source of prophetic nostalgia and exquisite, fleshed-out wisdom. Herein is Ontario pastoral and Space-Age romanticism, both scrutinized by a poet who inks truth that is satire.”
—George Elliott Clarke

“I found reading Eating Fruit out of Season to be like, well, like eating fruit out of season—unpredictable, intriguing, not every bite to my taste, but I didn’t want to stop eating.”
—Maureen Scott Harris

About the Author

David Livingstone Clink’s poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Prairie Journal, and in ten anthologies, including I.V. Lounge Nights, Garden Variety, Imagination in Action, and the forthcoming Tesseracts XIV (fall 2010). He edited the poetry anthology, A Verdant Green. His first book of poetry was Eating Fruit Out of Season. He lives in Toronto.

An unconventional and profound mixed-media poetry collection that blends traditional and avant garde forms to explore remembrance, grief, and mourning.

Daniel Scott Tysdal follows up his first award-winning collection of poetry with The Mourner’s Book of Albums, an emotionally striking and formally ambitious exploration of the elegiac tradition and the twenty-first-century attitude to remembrance and grief. Encountering a wide range of arresting events—from a best friend’s suicide to the war in Afghanistan, from improvised memorials to the plastinated corpses of Body Worlds—these innovative poems survey the forces and forms that shape what and how we mourn. The sonically lively lines, the vivid images, and the richly textured voices of the The Mourner’s Book of Albums are composed in a variety of traditional and unconventional forms—the lyric, the ballad, the graphic poem, and the fabricated document, to name a few—as a means of grappling with the many acts and practices that link the living and the dead. Tysdal compiles the albums, however fluid and fragile, that hold them together.

Click to read an excerpt from The Mourner’s Book of Albums.

Praise for Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method:

“Daniel Scott Tysdal’s poetry is an exhilarating mix of pop culture, philosophy, mythology, and visual art. Here is a poet who possesses the rare combination of experimental instinct and communicative acuity. Read this book for its confident virtuosity, its innovative spirit, and its surprising generosity.”
—Jon Paul Fiorentino

“Tysdal recognizes and deconstructs—playfully—the patented absurdity of conventional language. He employs academic, literary, and pop cultural terms, references, discourses, and images to underscore the implicit argument here that standard semantic structures—rhetorics—obscure truth and, thus, Justice. Yet, for all their high-minded, critical jouissance, the lyrics are lively with accessible puns, jokes, games, and satire.”
—George Elliot Clarke

“Tysdal at his best creates a complex, multidimensional, and often contradictory layering of thought and feeling; this tremendously rich, inventive, and energetic book is a most auspicious debut.”
—Malcolm Woodland, “Letters in Canada 2006: Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly

About the Author

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006), which received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). His work has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals and has earned him both an honourable mention at the 2003 National Magazine Awards and a place in the finals of the CBC’s 2005 National Poetry Face-Off. He teaches creative writing and English literature at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

In Fraser Sutherland’s latest collection of poems, Manual for Emigrants, all the myriad aspects of exile and belonging are explored in ways both witty and moving.

The voices of the outsider and the voices of those who believe they belong are juxtaposed in an impassioned dialogue that resists conclusion.

Click for an excerpt from Manual for Emigrants.

Fraser Sutherland has made a practice of hanging around people whose first language isn’t his own, and are otherwise as different as possible from him. Which is surprising, or maybe isn’t, because he is descended from an unbroken line of Highland Scots, was born in northern Nova Scotia, and has lived in Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, and Nelson, B.C. He now resides in Toronto.