Fearless and insightful poems that illuminate one woman’s experience of chronic illness, relationships and gender identity, and solitude.

Anna Swanson’s poetry leads you through a life that tries to deal with a misunderstood illness, a gradual acceptance of one’s sexuality, and a sometimes onerous relationship with nature. Her writing is as honest as it is complex, and it attempts to reconcile an identity that has been distorted by illness through a profound analysis of memory and individual meaning. With poems that run the gamut from fearful to the absurd, that are at once deep and pithy, Anna Swanson proves in The Nights Also that she is a brave new voice in Canadian poetry.

Anna Swanson studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her poetry has appeared in PRISM International, The Antigonish Review, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and numerous other literary journals. She has paid the rent by planning festivals, selling books, serving drinks, making maps, walking on stilts, bowling with teenagers, writing press releases, and watching for forest fires. She now lives in Vancouver, BC, and works as a children’s librarian.

Praise for The Nights Also:

“There are the nights, yes, but in this startling debut collection ‘each day is a / thin steel catwalk of light’ and ‘the sun makes its arc across the mouth’ . . . Each word and image is freshly forged. The poems are smart, original, and daring, the footwork so assured that Anna Swanson dances with the future with no missteps. This is a strong new voice that reaffirms my faith in the heartbeat and vision that poetry can give us.”

—Lorna Crozier

“As meditations on illness, these are extraordinary—sad, undermining, and, sometimes, spiked with a sense of humour.”

—Tim Lilburn

“ ‘Oh dear body,” Anna Swanson writes in her impressive debut collection, “How did we get here?” How indeed? Throughout The Nights Also, Swanson asks: What does it mean to be frail and human. What is illness? Health? Gender? Memory? Love? And though Swanson doesn’t (thank God) arrive at any definitive answers, her skill and delight in exploring life’s mysteries and complexities are palpable. These poems—intelligent, passionate, and beautifully executed—announce the arrival of a gifted poet, one I hope we’ll be hearing from for years to come.

—Patricia Young

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-13-0
ISBN-10: 1-926639-13-8
$14.95

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.

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

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-09-3
ISBN-10: 1-926639-09-X
Price: $16.95

Poems that reflect the individual’s experience in the urban jungle, combining observation and insight that every city dweller will recognize.

The city, at once benevolent and indifferent to its residents, is the inspiration for this debut collection of poetry by Suzanne Bowness. In the first poem, a young woman arrives in the big city, where “in the beginning, anonymity is everywhere,” and wonders what her life there will bring. Using this new arrival as her starting point, Bowness moves on to develop urban themes of anonymity and collectivity alongside individualist themes of freedom, loneliness, and growing self identity. Part private reflection, part love letter to the metropolis, The Days You’ve Spent pulls back the curtain on city life, finding beauty in neon signs and profundity in laundromats. In these poems, the individual and the city interweave, and urban immersion becomes an essential element in personal growth.

Suzanne (Sue) Bowness is a writer and editor whose poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada and Pagitica. Her play The Reading Circle won first place in the 2006 Ottawa Little-Theatre One-Act Playwriting Competition. She is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Ottawa with a focus on nineteenth-century Canadian magazines.

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-10-9
ISBN-10: 1-926639-10-3
$14.95

This collection of graphic poems brings together eighteen works that fall somewhere between a graphic novel and poetic verse. Participating authors reside across the country and include Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bok, Stacey May Fowles and Marlena Zuber, Tim Gaze, Jake Kennedy, Mark Laliberte, Donato Mancini, Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff, Gustave Morin, Marc Ngui, Paola Poletto, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Jen Pickering, and Sally McKay. Their poems tackle the broad topic of boredom: Is boredom a symptom of the absence of love? Does it suggest our present task is too easy? Inside, graphic doesnt always trump poetry and thus the ultimate tug of war isin the most captivating sensea real yawnyarn between word and image. We like images and we like words. With epigonic respect to Dada and concrete poetryand with of-the-moment admiration for the graphic novelwed like to think (we do think!) editors Jake Kennedy and Paola Poletto have collected something other. They are also flatlanders, mandalas, leg chewers, leaf-shakers, dogs, televisions, bricks, calligraphy, typefaces, remote controls, emblems, tazers, lightning bolts, hotels, and sinking cities. All of them sticking intrepidly an unwavering index into the hirsute gargoyle ear-well of boredom.

Jake Kennedy is a poet, prose writer, and teacher. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies. His chapbook, Hazard, is published by BookThug. Jake currently teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College.

Paola Poletto is an arts administrator, mixed media and installation artist, writer and curator. Artist-led projects have included Kiss Machine Magazine (co-founding publisher since 2000), Inflatable Museum (on-line exhibit 2001-2004), Girls and Guns (traveling exhibit Toronto-London, 2003; Budapest-Albania-Montenegro & Serbia, 2004), and Robot Landscapes (exhibit Toronto, 2004). She is senior director of programs at Design Exchange, Canadas national center for design (www.dx.org), where she oversees youth programs, professional programs, exhibitions, museum collection and research. She is also the director of digifest (www.dx.org/digifest), a festival of design and media culture produced by Design Exchange in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre and Harbourfront Centre.

ISBN – 10:0978335155
ISBN – 13:9780978335151

21.95 CAD

DOWN WITH ARBOREAL THOUGHT! // A Steel Bananas Project

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

“Refreshing, bursting with energy, and well worth a look”
- Stephen Cain

“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 contemporary 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.

Steel Bananas is a collective of artists and writers documenting and exploring the arts and contemporary theory from critical Canadian perspectives. Established in 2008, the online arts and culture zine is dedicated to publishing young, creative, diverse, sincere and analytical perspectives on contemporary art and Canadian urban culture, as well as showcasing the work of bourgeoning young members of the Canadian artistic and academic communities.

http://www.steelbananas.com

ISBN – 10:1926639073
ISBN – 13:9781926639079

18.95 CAD

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.

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.

ISBN – 10:1926639049
ISBN – 13:9781926639048

14.95 CAD

The poems in this collection are erotic and wry, a first hand tour through the world of today s woman for whom desire is no longer a dirty word. Wallin’s poems explore where the sensual woman has been and where she s going. If Candice Bushnell was a poet, these are the sort of poems she would write.

Myna Wallin is an author and editor in Toronto. She is also an organizer and host of the Art Bar Poetry Series. Her first poetry collection was A Thousand Profane Pieces (Tightrope Books, 2006), and her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Algonquin Square Table Anthology, Contemporary Verse 2, Existere, Eye Weekly, Kiss Machine, Literary Review of Canada, Matrix, Misunderstandings Magazine, Nod, Surface and Symbol, Taddle Creek, and Word: Canada’s Magazine for Readers and Writers.

www.mynawallin.com

ISBN – 10:0973864532
ISBN – 13:9780973864533

14.95 CAD

In The Stone Skippers, Burgham launches dazzling poems that explore the central core of our humanity upon the Canadian literary landscape. The poems examine how love is a territory we map with little skill. The speaker returns again and again to the distances we set up or have imposed upon ourselves by relationships of desire and love, all against the motif of conversations inner conversations, day-to-day conversations, one-sided conversations, unfinished and halting conversations.

Ian Burgham is an associate of the League of Canadian Poets. In 2004 he won the Queens University Well-Versed Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of both Queens University and the University of Edinburgh, and has lived for extended periods in various parts of the world. He served as a senior editor at Canongate Publishing in Edinburgh during the early 1980s. His poems have been published in a number of literary journals and magazines including dANDelion, Queens Quarterly, Scottish Arts Journal, Harpweaver, and the Literary Review of Canada. Burgham has had one poetry book published in the United Kingdom: Confession of Birds, (2003 chapbook). His first full collection of poems, The Stone Skippers, will be published in Australia and New Zealand by Sunline Press, Perth (introduction by Newcastle Prize winning poet, Roland Leach) and, in the UK by MacLean Dubois Publishers in February 2007 (Introduction by novelist and poet, Alexander McCall Smith). He is currently working on his third collection. Ian works as a volunteer to further the efforts of the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. He is an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queens University.

ISBN – 10:0973864583
ISBN – 13:9780973864588

21.95 CAD

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk’s second collection of poetry is dangerously sarcastic, Toronto-local, bitter, sweet, and bruising in its honesty. Challenging the notions of what a girl runs from, both literally and figuratively, Somewhere to Run From takes on complex settings from which to depart: poverty, pop and sub-culture, madness and normative sexuality among these locations.

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk is a Montreal-born, Toronto-based author, performer and activist with an extensive background in community radio. She has been published in magazines and anthologies across North America and is a regular contributor to NOW, Broken Pencil Magazine, and Herizons as well as writing for This, $pread, HOUR and others. Her first book, Emergency Contact, was released with McGilligan Books in 2006 to wide critical acclaim and was taught through the English Department at York University.

ISBN – 10:097833518X
ISBN – 13:9780978335182

14.95 CAD

In Open Slowly by Dayle Furlong young lovers tangle, tumble and dance their way through the urban landscape. They lose each other and rediscover each other in cafs and bars, over latt and beer while the city watches and waits for solitude to reassert itself. As the title suggests this is a book to be opened slowly, savoured like a surprise gift from a lover who will inevitably be forgotten, even while the gift remains.

Dayle Furlong studied English Literature & Fine Arts at York University. Her writing has appeared in Taddle Creek, Kiss Machine, The Puritan, Word & The Voice. She works as a literary publicist, a screenwriter ’s assistant and for Descant Magazine. She has lived in all regions of Canada and has travelled throughout Central America, Asia & the US. She currently lives in Toronto.

ISBN – 10:0978335139
ISBN – 13:9780978335137

14.95 CAD