By CR Avery
In his take-no-prisoners style of verse and performance, Avery poetry is alternately profane, brilliantly vulgar, unsettling, outrageously funny and brash in it’s lonesome courage, and unquestionably original.
The Song Collides takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world—and then back via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life as an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simultaneous and nearly imperceptible process that lasts, we hope, at least until the exit.
Suicide Psalms is both hymn and visceral scream—of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off the ledge.
Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food brings to the table some of Canada’s best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver’s literary and culinary scene.
Swing In the Hollow is a debut collection of poetry from poet and memoirist Ryan Knighton.
By Jamie Reid
A Temporary Stranger is the final manuscript that Jamie Reid was working on when he died unexpectedly in June of 2015. The book is comprised of three sections: “Homages,” “Fake Poems,” and “Recollections.”
By klipschutz
This Drawn & Quartered Moon makes pre-millennial San Francisco its epicenter, and from there ranges out in time and space. Characters abound. The reader will meet a plagiarist, a Vietnam vet named Othello, a Mafia don, a drug mule en route to jail, Elvis Presley (the poet’s father was his doctor), a “Sculptor of the Lower Fillmore Head Shot,” a dying Arab king and a pre-fame Courtney Love.
In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery that opened an examination of mortality and crisis. This long-poem memoir tracks the author’s experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself.
Twenty-first century metalheads; twelfth century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz—what could they possibly have in common?
Sharon McCartney addresses difficult, emotionally straining subjects head-on with strength, wonder and passion in this fine collection.
