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Art or War: The Bullet Paintings of Viktor Mitic
with an Introduction by Ewan Whyte

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-15-4
ISBN-10: 1-926639-15-4
$21.95

Handy with a paintbrush and a gun, Viktor Mitic’s provocative art has people all over the world talking about his take on war, religion, and politics.

Artist Viktor Mitic is making headlines in Canada and the UK with his controversial gunshot paintings, which feature portraits of celebrities (Quentin Tarantino, John Lennon), iconic religious figures (Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary), and famous works or art (The Last Supper, Guernica) outlined in bullet holes. Shocked by recent occasions when places of worship were attacked and destroyed; for example, the defacement of Christian frescoes by soldiers and villagers in Kosovo, Mitic explains that his goal is to use weapons in his art to create rather than to destroy. Guns are naturally perceived with uneasiness, and the image of an artist shooting a painting of an iconic figure carries an intense psychological impact; however, the juxtaposition of beauty constructed out of violence in Mitic’s paintings generates an unexpected feeling of tranquility. In his own words, “Although the process is very loud, there is a sense of peace after the smoke is gone.” The fifty works of art presented in this book will be accompanied by writing by ten distinguished Canadian authors, including Lynn Crosbie and Gary Michael Dault.

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. Viktor’s first book, Dealers: 36 Portraits of Toronto’s Art Dealers, was published by Tightrope in 2009.  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.

Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. His short stories, poetry, translations, and reviews have been published in literary journals and magazines, and he has read his translations of Catullus on public radio in the US. His translation of the poetry of Catullus was published in 2004. He is currently finishing a novel and translating the complete poetry of Horace.

Praise for the paintings of Viktor Mitic:

“Sometimes he’s right on and sometimes he’s not . . . Some of it is smartass, some of it is mischievous, but that’s art too.”
—Charles Pachter, Globe and Mail, USA Today

“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

Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar
Myna Wallin

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-11-6
ISBN-10: 1-926639-11-1
$18.95

Sex is casual, but conversation is a serious matter in the outrageous adventures of this contemporary cougar.

In Myna Wallin’s second book, a reluctant cougar tells all. She feasts on young men of all kinds, in a world where sex isn’t dirty but love is coated in grime. In these raucous short stories, she runs the gauntlet of men, including a Harley-riding bikini salesman, a semiotics professor, a foot fetishist, a jaded brand consultant, a homeless man, and a bisexual mime. Written with Wallin’s signature wit, this semiotics of dating is given a postmodern twist.

Myna Wallin is an author and editor born and living in Toronto. She is also an organizer and host of the Art Bar Reading Series. Myna’s first full-length poetry collection, A Thousand Profane Pieces, was published in 2006 by Tightrope Books. 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, In the Dark: Stories from the Supernatural, the Literary Review of Canada, Matrix, Nod, and Rampike. She recently received an Honourable Mention from Contemporary Verse 2 for their 2009 2-Day Poem Contest. Myna also hosts “In Other Words” on CKLN, where she has been interviewing authors since 2004. After receiving her MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, Myna taught Effective Writing at George Brown College for several years. For Tightrope she has edited Sandra Kasturi’s The Animal Bridegroom, Phoebe Tsang’s Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse, and co-edited I.V. Lounge Nights with Alex Boyd.

Praise for A Thousand Profane Pieces:

“Wallin’s book is exhilarating: a dollop of sugar-coated acid. Its subtitle should be, Love and the Older, Single Woman: The persona has been hurt, has snapped back, but vows her vulnerability … The tone? Ms. Sylvia Plath Atwood: Satire and Cynicism for the Discriminating Reader. Wallin’s wit exudes wisdom and wrath. Perfect.”
—George Elliott Clarke

The Days You’ve Spent
Suzanne Bowness

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

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.

The Grammar of Distance
Ian Burgham

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

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

The Nights Also
Anna Swanson

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

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.

Got No Secrets
Danila Botha

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-08-6
ISBN-10: 1-926639-08-1
$18.95

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.

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.

Salt Water & Cinnamon Skin
mónica rosas

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-12-3
ISBN-10: 1-926639-12-X
$18.95

In a world where reality and the supernatural collide, a woman is forced to revisit her past in order to face her future.

In the first title in Tightrope Books’ new Latino-Canadian imprint, Zurita, mónica rosas delivers an inspiring first novel about a woman’s second coming of age. When thirty-year-old Clara returns to her native Brazil to put her life back together following a failed relationship, she witnesses a shattering scene and is suddenly forced to make a choice that will continue to haunt her in her quest for self-discovery. Spanning three generations, six countries, and a number of alternate spirit worlds, Salt Water & Cinnamon Skin is told through a series of stories from the perspectives of conflicting but intertwining presences in Clara’s life. A story about love, betrayal, and redemption, rosas’ original and captivating novel delves into the cyclical nature of world history, rooted in violence and dispossession, to expose what truly lies at its heart: our human search for belonging.

mónica rosas is an educator/agitator/artist whose work aims to challenge and provoke community discussion on gender, the environment, and the visible minority experience. A first-generation Colombian-Peruvian Canadian, she grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. She has since travelled and worked in Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil, writing and teaching English and drama. mónica is the author of Inside Out, a collection of poetry published by Lyrical Myrical, and her poetry has been published in Disapora Dialogues’ TOK Anthology, Writing the New Toronto.