A summer of heavy metal, racial tension, and love a stunning debut. From the mosh pit, to the barbeque pit. From the heavy metal rack in your record store to the beat-up metal lashed to the bike rack outside. A book about tenderness and adrenalin. A book about friendship and chainsaw guitars. Ladies and gentlemen, for those with the benefit of flash photography: Titanium Punch. Yashin Blake’s remarkable debut novel is an exquisitely wrought introduction to a cast of characters  a world, in fact  that until now had no literary voice. In Titanium Punch Issac Iqbal” Khan, a devout headbanger, comes of age in a summer of beer, bikes, concerts, camping, and love. It’s a breathless take on a young man in the midst of significant personal evolution, a man coming to terms with religious intolerance and subtle racism, with bad cops and hidden agendas. A man about to fall in love. Iqbal gives you a backstage pass to the shadowy world of underground music, opening up its racial, cultural, and sexual mix to the scrutiny of many who’d prefer not to acknowledge its existence and relevance. From Pantera to jazz, from the importance of heavy metal lyrics to watching your buddy’s back, Titanium Punch pulls no punches.

Titanium Punch

Comics & Graphic Novels

Blake, Yashin

Graphic Novels

a misFit book

Christopher Dewdney has been working on the The Natural History for two decades. He describes it as a book about high summer, though according to his natural history the fingers of summer reach in both directions of time: as early as March and as late as November. This is a sensual book, in love not only with foliage and creatures, weather and landscape, but also with the textures of language, the rhythm of English itself; not just Anglo Saxon and Germanic, but also its southern Latin heritage blowing like a scientific sirocco up from the Mediterranean. A compendium of particulars written from the inside of its subject, The Natural History evokes the timeless moment of perception itself. And while it is set in the present, the whole geological past of the planet is represented, so that an event occurring on a summer day in current time will be juxtaposed with an event occurring during the Silurian epoch, some 440 million years ago. Revised, augmented, and presented in its entirety for the first time here, The Natural History is one of the most beautiful and erotic bodies of work this country has to offer. As Stan Dragland has commented: "The New-Old World of this long poem… is sensuously and conceptually so immediate that orgasm and epiphany are one in it. This is writing, and reading, as immersion." "There is no one else in this country… who has so persuasively chipped away at a rock face to reveal the poetry striated just beneath the surface.… These intelligent, uncompromising sensual poems are not for the rapid reader, but anyone who lingers with them a while will be amply repaid." — Quill &amp; Quire

The Natural History

Literature & Fiction

Dewdney, Christopher

Poetry

This collection takes off from where Sky Gilbert’s first volume of poetry concluded and begs the question: Has Sky Gilbert grown up? Thankfully, the answer is no. Like Digressions of a Naked Party Girl, Temptations of a Juvenile Deliquent does not represent a fine literary turn by a respected man of letters, nor is it an experiment in metaphor and metonymy ripe for exegesis and respect. Instead, it’s a personal, confessional, hilarious, rant-filled thrill-ride where familiar streets are filled with gay boys, hookers, Key West sunshine, and movie stars. These are poems written on the run, between tricks, after orgies, and before that last cigarette at 4 in the morning. They are meant to be read: out loud, in bed, or simply as a tool for seduction. This dangerous book is recommended to minors, the inexperienced, the virginal, shut ins, and the sexually repressed, not University courses or best-seller lists anywhere.

Temptations for a Juvenile Delinquent

Gilbert, Sky

Know Your Monkey is the debut poetry collection by Toronto novelist and screenwriter Elyse Friedman. Plainspoken yet vivid, funny yet poignant, these are poems that tell stories. In Bleeding & Laughing at Pineway & Cummer’, a group of teens dizzy with spring and spirits and speed’ race a van through the suburbs after grade nine prom. In The Great Thing My Cousin George Did’, a man simultaneously drives two cars from Toronto to Hamilton: 100 yards then hop out/run back to/the other car/100 yards past the first car /and so on / and so on / with the polio / leg.’ In Paradise Mural’ we meet a woman at a Holiday Inn singles’ dance who always tried to giggle / but it came off the gangplank of her tongue / like it had been / pushed’. Friedman writes candidly about her own experiences with love, family, and work. In Screenwriting 101’, she rails against the formulaic rules that have come to govern the craft of movie-writing. In Rescue’ she fantasizes about being stranded on a desert island with Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. Never precious or inscrutable, Know Your Monkey gives us rhythmical slices of real and imagined life.

Know Your Monkey

Friedman, Elyse

Bizarre sexual parables, hilarious science fiction, fables, text-tangles, dirty stories, lush love letters, re-visionary fairy tales, predictions,strange new games, dream transcripts, and a complete handbook of absurdist instructions, including one on the dangerous arts of pig-swallowing. With all the lyricism and wit which have made his columns in NOW magazine and his Dr. Poetry segments on CBC’s Wordbeat so entertaining and provocative, this collection gathers for the first time the very best of Robert Priest's short prose. A fabulist in the tradition of Borges and Cortazar, he brings to these postcard pieces the same poignant, and twisted but brilliant sensibility which has made him one of the most entertaining and challenging poets of his generation.

How to Swallow a Pig

Priest, Robert

United States

it’s the extravagance of Vaughan’s vision, together with his lyricism and humanity, that make it possible to walk with him into the darkness, into the place where we are all alone”  Globe and Mail Ruined Stars combines a penchant for formal experimentation with a unique, often engagingly puzzling devotion to language and its limits. RM Vaughan’s third collection, Ruined Stars explores his obsession with travel, magic, and sex  each subject layered and re-layered with the confessional fictions” his poetry is famous for. Fans of Vaughan’s previous books can look forward to more baroque feats of word play, some gossipy asides, and the insights of a questioning heart.

Ruined Stars

Vaughan, RM

These stories are portraits of men adrift in their own fantasies, failures, and confusing successes. In the title story, a man's desire to bring an honourable end to a love affair is severely tested by the internal and external obstacles presented by a long summer afternoon. My God, Richard Is Beautiful” follows the drifting, post-coital reflections of a young man who has just slept with his close friend's girlfriend, while House Cleaning” enacts a comic psychodrama of love, anti-depressants, and class warfare.

The Long Slide

Grainger, James

Contemporary

?The legendary Terry Sawchuk is said to have kept parts of himself in jars: one for teeth, one for bone chips, and another for his appendix. no cage contains a stare that well is jarring in much the same way. Each poem in this collection is a self-contained vessel in which a distinct bit of our national game a player or a fight, a save or a goal, an injury or a regret is preserved; mementos cross-cut into countless sheets of ice. Often dark and brooding, this book offers a league of gloomy characters: a spiteful Zamboni driver and a nearly blinded beer-leaguer; a maimed minor-hockey coach and that over-bearing hockey dad you’ve heard in the rink. These are poems about hockey shifting their way through the game, its characters, images, and passions. no cage contains a stare that well is like an impossible glove save in overtime exulting in the game while examining the darker, musty corners of its locker rooms. But these poems speak to life off-ice as well: to how we know what we know, how we feel what we feel, and how we win or lose.

no cage contains a stare that well

Robinson, Matt

Welcome to 1984 and the town of South Wakefield. Chris Lane is 14 and he's sure that he can see the future, or at least guess what's inside of Christie Brinkley's mind. But he can't foresee the closing of Joyland, the town’s only video arcade. With the arcade’s passing comes a summer of teenage lust, violence, and a search for new entertainment. Never far away is Chris’s younger sister, Tammy, who plays spy to the events that will change the lives of her family and town forever. Joyland is a novel about the impossibility of knowing the future. Schultz bring the Cold War home in a novel set to the digital pulse of video games and the echoes of hair metal. Joyland is illustrated throughout by graphic novelist Nate Powell, whose work has been praised by Sin City creator Frank Miller as observant, intimate cartooning [that] surgically cuts to the bone.”

Joyland

Schultz,Emily

Literary

you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome / you are a man / you are a little confused / you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome . . . ”Apostrophe” is: a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though present b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe c) a programapostropheengine.cabased on the 1993 poem that hijacks search engines in order to extend the poem infinitely d) a book of poetry written using the website The answer: e) all of the above. Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry’s Apostrophe contains all of these things, except the search engine (but you can visit that any time you like). Each line from the original poem has become the title of a new poem generated by the program’s metonymic romp through the World Wide Web. Phrases rub against each other promiscuously; poems and readers alike come to their own conclusions. The results are by turns poignant, banal, offensive and hilarious, but always surprising and always unaffected. In other words, everything a book of contemporary poetry should be, and then some. Poet and scholar Charles Bernstein has suggested that Apostrophe may be related to Freud’s notion of the uncanny, a somnambulistic drift that appears aimless yet somehow always returns to you.” Apostrophe is an entirely new kind of poetry: neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory.

Apostrophe

Kennedy, Bill

Wershler-Henry, Darren

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