In Fine Form

ISBN-10: 1-55192-777-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-551927-77-0
Price: $29.95
Pub Date: March 2005

Now being distributed by Tightrope Books

With this groundbreaking anthology, poets and teachers Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve set out to explore Canadian form poetry. The result is a thrilling collection of 175 poems, over 140 poets from the 18th century to the present day, and 20 distinct poetic forms (sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, epigrams, pallindromes, blues and more) that will appeal to every poetry-lover as well as teachers and students of poetry.

Poets include Bliss Carman, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Dennis Lee, George Elliott Clarke, Alden Nowlan, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Molly Peacock, Lorna Crozier, Anne Simpson, Emile Nelligan, Adam Sol, Barbara Nickel, Christian Bok and over 100 more. “No verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job.” -T. S. Eliot

 

About The Editors

Kate Braid (Vancouver) is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry. Her books have won the Pat Lowther and VanCity Book Prizes and been shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She teaches at Malaspina University-College.

Sandy Shreve (Vancouver) is also the author of three books of poetry. She has received the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry and been shortlisted for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award and a National Magazine Award for Poetry. She founded Poetry in Transit in BC.

Posted in Anthologies, Anthology, Catalogue, I, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011

ISBN-10: 1-926639-41-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-26639-41-3
Price: $19.95
Pub Date: Fall 2011


The outstanding success of The Best Canadian Poetry in English series continues in 2011 with guest editor Priscila Uppal.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011 proudly continues a series that kicked off with a bang in 2008 and thrives under the stewardship of esteemed editor Molly Peacock and a different acclaimed poet guest editor each year.

This year Priscila Uppal chose the fifty best Canadian poems published in Canadian online and print literary journals in 2010. With this anthology, readers– often baffled by the proliferating poems and poets– are able to tap into the remarkable and vibrant Canadian poetry scene.

About the Guest Editor

Priscila Uppal is a poet, novelist, and York University professor. Her publications include Ontological Necessities (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology, Successful Tragedies (Bloodaxe books, UK), Winter Sport: Poems (written as Canadian Athletes Now poet-in-residence for the Olympic and Paralympic Games) the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern, and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.” Visit priscilauppal.ca

About the Series Editor

Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush; a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece; and a one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering Verge.” She is a contributing editor of the Literary Review of Canada and a faculty mentor at the Spalding MFA Program. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delaney Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, which was nominated for BC’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Praise for The Best Canadian Poetry series

“Some of us can only afford a half a dozen or so subscriptions to literary magazines, so the publication of The Best Canadian Poetry in English, now in its third year, is a welcome event.”
- Maxianne Berger, Rover Arts

“This would be an excellent book for the academic and the casual poetry fan who wants to dust off the rust in their CanLit poetry ligaments.”
- Michael Peckham, Broken Pencil

“The collection is a unique glimpse at a diversity of poets, from Ottawa’s David O’Meara to Margaret Atwood to the reverend P.K Page.”
- Cormac Rae, Ottawa Xpress

Posted in Anthologies, B, Catalogue, Fall 2011, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Onion Man – Kathryn Mockler

ISBN-10: 1-926639-39-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-39-0
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: November 2011

This sparse and powerful poetic debut, weaves a tale of heartache, dissolution, and coming of age.

Onion Man is an intense and masterly sculpted series of linked poems set in London, Ontario, in the late 1980s– a time in Canada when the recession lay like a lead weight on the shoulders of young people, leaving the future bleak.

The poems are told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn canning factory, and they follow her relationship with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.”

The Onion Man doesn’t speak English and is tormented by the other workers. After his son dies, he commits suicide at the factory, and the girl finds his body. This traumatic event causes her to rethink the direction of her life.

About the Author

Kathryn Mockler is the author of the poetry books Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011) and The Saddest Place on Earth (forthcoming in December 2012 with DC Books). She received her MFA from the University of British Columbia and her BA in Honors English and Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in Descant, Joyland, The Capilano Review, The Antigonish Review, The Puritan, La Petite Zine, Geist, and This Magazine. Her films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have screened at numerous festivals. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Western University and is the co-founder of the online journal The Rusty Toque.

Praise for Onion Man

“Mockler can’t hide anything in lines this clean and spare. Onion Man delivers a bold, candid voice. It’s a book of brave choices. We have a winner in Kathryn Mockler.
– Michael V. Smith

“With Onion Man, Mockler does for the Pillsbury factory was Dante did for hell. But Mockler is funnier. Nearly every piece on this epic, romantic novel-in-verse cracked me up and, like the best comedians, Mockler breaks your heart while she makes you laugh. Her deadpan wit is dead-on and her understated insight is fathoms deep. You’ve never read a book of poetry like this.”
– Sharon McCartney

Posted in Catalogue, Fall 2011, O, Poetry | Tagged , , |

Sunday, the locusts | Jim Johnstone

Sunday, the locusts, by Jim JohnstoneISBN-10: 1-926639-36-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-36-9
Price: $18.95
Pub Date: Spring 2011

Award-winning poet Jim Johnstone unites science, poetry, and art in an innovative and intellectual examination of the symbolism associated with locusts.

A long poem that probes love and loss in fragments of verse and hybrid-media collage, Sunday, the locusts is a post-apocalyptic tour-de-force.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines including developmental biology, geology and philosophy, Jim Johnstone and Julienne Lottering blur linguistic boundaries to create a unique collaborative text.

Hymn, map, portent—Sunday, the locusts warns against inevitable extinction while also revelling in the vivacity of personhood.

About the Author

Jim Johnstone (b. 1978) is a writer and physiologist in Toronto. He is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). His poems have been published in several Canadian magazines, including Descant, enRoute, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and PRISM International and anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010. He is the founder and editor of Misunderstandings Magazine and poetry editor of Cactus Press. See jimjohnstone.wordpress.com.

About the Illustrator

Julienne Lottering was born in South Africa but has been living in Canada and exhibiting in Toronto, Lyon, and New York since 2000. Her artwork has appeared on the book cover of Life and the Sheath of Enlightenment and in Misunderstandings Magazine.

Praise for Patternicity

Patternicity transforms the mundane into the otherworldly.”
—Mark Callanan, Quill & Quire

“I love Patternicity for its dirty noises . . . Jim Johnstone’s forms are shapely, but feral. His music is beautifully rational, complex and charismatic.”
—Carmine Starnino

Posted in Catalogue, Poetry, S, Spring 2011 | Tagged , , , |

Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light

ISBN-10: 1-926639-32-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-32-1
Price: $19.95
Pub Date: May 2011


An anthology of poetry and fiction with the city of Paris as its unifying thread.

The stunning variety of writing in this volume addresses the city of Paris in all its complexity, while challenging the mythology of expatriate Parisian literature. The anthology contains entries as diverse and disparate as an excerpt from John Berger’s novel, Here is Where We Meet; Suzanne Allen’s ekphrastic poetry, a tongue-in-cheek take on the nineteenth-century novel by Helen Cusack O’Keeffe; Canadian writer Lisa Pasold’s story of a forced extended stay in Paris; and an interview with the celebrated American poet Alice Notley.

Strangers in Paris presents anglophone Parisian writing as it is today, without the veneer and expectations of stereotypes, romantic notions, or iconic representations. More than anything, this anthology is a landmark, a notice that begs and entices readers to explore the current English-language authorship developing in and about Paris.

Featuring work from Suzanne Allen, Mia Bailey, David Barnes, Barbara Beck, Edward Belleville, John Berger, Judith Chriqui, Marie Davis, Sion Dayson, David Eso, Megan Fernandes, Jorie Graham, Jeffrey Greene, Jonathan Hamrick, Isabel Harding, Marty Hiatt, Margaret J. Hults, Andrea Jonsson, Julie Kleinman, Antonia Klimenko, Sam Langer, Colin Joseph Wolfgang Mahar, Alexander Kolya Maksik, Jessica Malcomson, Danielle McShine, Alice Notley, Helen Cusack O’Keeffe, Lisa Pasold, Rufo Quintavalle, Alberto Rigettini, Sarah Riggs, Eleni Sikelianos, Kathleen Spivack, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Willis, and Neil Uzzell.

Editor Biographies

David Barnes moved to Paris in 2003 with the idea of staying for six months. He is still there. He won Shakespeare and Company’s short story competition, Travel in Words, in 2006 and now runs a writing workshop there and a weekly open mic poetry night in Belleville called SpokenWord. His stories have been published by Spot Lit Magazine, Upstairs at Duroc, and 34th Parallel.

Megan Fernandes is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently writing a dissertation on cognitive approaches to twentieth-century Irish and American literature. During her time in Paris, she has conducted research at the Center for Literature and Cognition at the Université Paris VIII and will be published in the upcoming issue of Upstairs at Duroc (2010). She has presented at conferences in the US, Ireland, and Poland and has an essay on Beckett to be published in the literary journal, Miranda (University Press of Toulouse).

Posted in Anthologies, Catalogue, Poetry, S, Spring 2011 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Contrary | Ruth Roach Pierson

Contrary, by Ruth Roach PiersonISBN-10: 1-926639-33-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-33-8
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: Spring 2011





Governor General’s Award finalist Ruth Pierson’s third collection of poetry articulates the oppositional emotions that develop with the loss of a loved one.

While humour, fond remembrance, and wry awareness break through, contrariness tinges many of the poems in this collection, a contrariness rooted in rueful self-examination, in feelings of living at cross purposes with the expected and the polite, of seeing the world aslant.

At the heart of Contrary is an unflinching portrayal of the emotional maelstrom that overtook the poet as she faced the dying and death of her only brother.

These are poems that mount an opposition, poems that contradict and argue, sometimes in jest, sometimes in deadly seriousness, poems that read unexpected messages into paintings and photographs, poems that are attuned to the dialectic undercurrents of living.

About the Author

Ruth Roach Pierson took up the pen in pursuit of poetry after a distinguished career in academia. Her poems have appeared in ARC, Event, The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Pagitica, Pottersfield Portfolio, Prism International, Queen’s Feminist Review, Quills, Room of One’s Own, and Vallum as well as a number of anthologies. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two cats, Haiku and Orange Roughy.

Posted in C, Catalogue, Poetry, Spring 2011 | Tagged , , |

Poetry NOW: 3rd annual Battle of the Bards

Ruth Roach PiersonMarch 30, 2011, starting at 7:30 pm
Harbourfront Centre, Brigantine Room
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto, ON

1 stage. 20 poets. 1 winner.

This popular poetry competition returns in 2011 to feature 20 of Canada’s upcoming and established poets. One poet will receive an automatic invitation to read at the 32nd annual International Festival of Authors, AND an ad for their book in NOW!

Poetry NOW is presented in partnership with NOW Magazine and the Harbourfront Centre.

It will feature our very own Ruth Roach Pierson!

For more information on the event and to see who else is participating, please click here.

Ruth’s latest book is Contrary, a poetry collection being released this month.

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Freeing Your Erotic Self in Poetry or Prose with Myna Wallin

Saturday, April 16, 2011
12-5 p.m.
Tightrope Books Office (602 Markham Street, Toronto)
$50


“I want to know them well, intimately. I have to be able to describe them.”
~The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One

Do you feel self-conscious when you are writing sex scenes in novels? Does your love poetry lack lust(re)? The goal of this course is to find a vocabulary for the erotic self; writers will explore ways of describing their characters’ lives fully and unselfconsciously, to enhance the story or poem at hand. Exploring your sensual self can be exciting, freeing. How much is too much sex; how much is not enough? By incorporating just the right amount of eroticism into your writing you will add a level of depth and authenticity to your writing. Continue reading

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Excerpt from Animal Bridegroom, “The Burning Woman”

The Burning Woman

Listen!
You can hear her pale voice
from within the conflagration.
It always speaks truth.
It always lies.
She cackles like marrow-bone
when she walks.
Her eyes and mouth are open
and burn like magnesium.
She is a contrary Gorgon;
everything she looks at
is forced into frenzied life.
If you are very lucky
and can run after her
until she catches you,
you can put her in a canning jar
to hold in the air:

ablaze of fireflies
to light the darkness.


For more information about The Animal Bridegroom or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from Best Canadian Poetry 2008, “Introduction”

Introduction

As I read 2007′s possible contenders – each on several occasions, to increase a poem’s chances of striking me in a receptive moment – what was I looking for? First: good writing. Awkward or rote syntax; familiar expressions, images and locutions; or random lineation, ruled a poem out. A meaningfully rebellions and distinctive syntax or deliberately dissonant music often riled it in. Second: depth and challenge, be that emotional or intellectual. If additional readings failed to yield new insights and appreciations, but rather, dulled the flash I’d sensed the first time around, the poem lost its Post-it note. Finally, and inseparable from the first two criteria: an interesting, even strange, sensibility or imagination. (As an undergrad, I fumed when one of my instructors remarked that my poems failed to startle. I didn’t want to startle; surely the startle factor was overrated. Only later dud I realize that what I did want to do – to please – doomed my poems to mediocrity.) “Startling” need not imply clatter and flash. I sought poems that excited and surprised me, that felt (boldly or quietly) necessary, often urgent. I sought poems serious and poems frivolous (though seriously frivolous). Those poems that played it safe, that failed to follow through on the risks they initiated, or that took risks apparently for their own sake, without integrity to form content, did not make it into the anthology, though some distinguished themselves enough to appear on the long list. I was without doubt a tougher critic than if I’d been reading fewer poems, but asking myself whether I could confidently put mu name behind a particular choice forced me to be discerning.


For more information about The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from Best Canadian Poems 2009, “Introduction: Canadian Poetry Today”

Introduction: Canadian Poetry Today
The Feeling for Being: Canadian Poetry in a Landscape

Today’s Canadian poetry is an adventure undertaken with brio. Its clarity and surge are evident equally whether its mood is dark or light, its pace meditative or militant. Great human hopes and debates are engaged with an openness that bespeaks humility, but with the confidence that leads an artist to firm outline, to vivid colour and movement. These qualities are evident on every page of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009. Let me choose these lines from Dave Margoshes’ poem “Becoming a Writer”:

What could be easier than learning to write?
Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,
they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,
the bowel, the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod.
Reach inside and there they are…


For more information about The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from Bone Dream, “The Haptic Sensibility”

The Haptic Sensibility

A dream site where a heart beats
Beneath the rattle of parched leaves.

After Cupid, Psyche begins to grind
the left-over mice bones of her dreams:
from chip to dust, from done to undone
a small pyramid of gray loam forming
heavier than a moor fog, finer than shaved nutmeg.
Her fingertips meld tears and dust into a small basin:

…while Aphrodite, her none too happy
mother-in-law, readies herself for cocktails…

That night, Psyche empties herself of regret.
The basin’s clear as the Aegean.
She drapes the skeletal sapling of her boy-soul
over the sea, securing him with strands
of her strawberry hair to create a bridge
his battered sternum the platform from which she dives
God’s crushing ache in creating paradise.


For more information about Bone Dream or to purchase a copy, please click here.

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Excerpt from Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse, “The Magician’s Wife”

The Magician’s Wife

When I’m with you I am not myself:
you call me Bella
then all words are consumed
by our kissing.

It’s not that you don’t like to talk.
From beneath a dark-brimmed hat
you hide behind other men’s
philosophies, conjure
the mythologies of stars
on a cloudy night.

Your smile’s contagious
yet I only know the expressions
of your face by touch,
the fluid transformations
of your chameleon skin
each time I draw nearer than sight.

You take me in under
your hunter’s cloak and I
vanish, leave no trace of timed
existence except the memory
of white-gloved fingerprints.

I know better than to ask,
When are we going home?

Not in any room built of our bodies
have I found the arcane fire
you alluded to in dream.

When sky shuts its medusa-eyes
I watch you sleeping
as if the innocence of each
shallow breath could return
the wisdom I’ve sacrificed to be beautiful.


For more information about Contents from a Mermaid’s Purse or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from Eating Fruit Out of Season, “Cottage Road”

Cottage Road

Up near the August cottage, fences separate
the farms, keep livestock from wandering.

I sometimes drive these dirt roads,
the lake disappearing from view,

parents on porches drinking lemonade.
I remember the feeling of drifting home

after witnessing a barn float away
on the mirage of grass, the sky swallowing birds,

and the excitement of a child who wanted
to follow every road to it’s conclusion.

These dirt roads criss-cross every once in a while,
and I notice childhood on clotheslines,

the smell of dirt and rock stirred up,
and the black and white of cows.


For more information about Eating Fruit Out of Season or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from I.V. Lounge Nights, “The End of the World”

The End of The World

The persistent cough, the routine procedure,
the congenital defect, the faulty wiring,
the fire in the starboard engine, the force majeure,
the mistress in the city, the last spirited thrust,
the little breeze off the coast of Africa,
the apples torn from the trees,
the unopened mail, the paperboy ringing the bell,
the atmospheric anomaly, the snow on the TV,
the hot wind with its tincture of rotten fish,
the wasps-nest of tumors, the drug-resistant strain,
the feeding tube, the shunt, the morphine drip,
the fatigue and general malaise,
the night inventory of the medicine cabinet,
the sleeping pills, the razor blades,
the reversals suffered as a child,
the bend in the road, the patch of black ice,
the telephone pole advancing in the high beams,
the statistical improbability, the cougar attack,
the stray piece of cosmic debris, the locals celebrating
the wedding of the loveliest girl in the village
by firing their guns into the air.


For more information about I.V. Lounge Nights or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from Iron-on Constellations, “What I Learned Growing Up in Parkdale”

What I learned growing up in Parkdale

Cars never stop for pedestrians
Kids should buy cigarettes in ones, it’s cheaper
Lake Ontario was once clean enough to swim in
Cadillacs invariably carry pimps
You can’t find parking on Sundays Continue reading

Posted in Excerpts, Poetry | Tagged , , , , |

Excerpt from Manual for Emigrants, “Faces”

Faces

You have a new face.

Living a life needs familiar faces, the faces of your family, of your friends.

I don’t recognize your face.

Or your family. Or your friends.

Somewhere down the line you chose the wrong mask.

Turn you face to the wall; show us the blank back of the head.

Blankness is something we recognize.


For more information about Manual for Emigrants or to purchase the book, please click here.

Posted in Excerpts, Poetry | Tagged , , , , |

Excerpt from Open Slowly, “She Seeks Beauty”

She Seeks Beauty

She seeks beauty everywhere
foraging for flowers in fog
as the metallic din of machinery bordering
the park clangs and disturbs—she dislikes
comments we make about the weight of bulbs
all they have to do is sit, look pretty, and breathe
in truth, they’re fibrous, sturdy, necessary for life.

She’s culpable as any, flesh covers bone
like a clenched fist
taut in sections, ample in others
the weight of water and salt,
breath noxious

she tells us flowers deceive like a woman
warns us to watch out for the men hiding behind them

they cast shadows on sun
etch their place
on earth, bodies pyramids
of accomplishment.

While we sit pretty and still, necessary.


For more information about Open Slowly or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from Somewhere to Run From, “Objects of My Affection”

Objects of My Affection

Your girlfriend’s rib cage cracks, bone against headboard, when you fuck her in my bed. In every poem she hits her head. Her small body breaks uncontrollably under your hot hand. A broken girl cannot cry. I am left here.

A tree house. Three new vines. Expired birthday balloons. Raw cane sugar. Remnants are just that: reminders. My hand is stamped with a stallion, the paper store, tiny icons remind me of you. Everything else small I Anna.

Your mouth on her makes you forget lyrics, the song you chose your name from. Makes you think about girls marked with black ink tattoos, thousands of miles down the coast. The song the radio played (the day you thought your life might be important) led to a crush on a deadly-wrong girl.

Your heart faltered over a dead dog.

When the song I loop tells me every little thing she does is magic, I think about older men and awards shows. We have an amicable conversation about pop songs and the girls who cover this one. It is stark, naked and maimed. It is also Anna. The girlfriend who still wears your bruises after three and a half years. You stole her youth, though you are the same age.

I want Anna’s health insurance, to get me through the night. Her warm whisky offerings. A prescription to cure me of her cold.


For more information about Somewhere to Run From or to purchase the book, please click here.

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Excerpt from The Stone Skippers, “The Stone Skippers”

The Stone Skippers

Beyond anywhere you might be now-beyond
the debris of all those elsewheres and whereabouts you
promised yourself you would inhabit if you had the time and
money (as if you could will it … as if you knew the direction),
children open their wide morning eyes and wade chest high into
stone skipping days, into neck deep light, into constant
conversations that bleed the mornings amber. Continue reading

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