Defiantly exploring the beauty and complexity of the everyday, the poetry of this collection takes on urban life. By sifting through the grit and grime of the city, the poet reveals the isolation, illness, love, and sexuality lurking beneath. Through short, confident bursts with the same startling colorfulness as graffiti on an alley wall, the poems reveal hidden layers of emotion and political motivation.

Iron-on Constellations

Literature & Fiction

Pohl-Weary, Emily

Poetry

Tightrope Books, Inc.

With an eclectic mix of plots and eccentric characters, the short stories of this collection make it possible to both fall in love with Julia, an adolescent guerrilla, and witness Robin wax philosophic with Batman on regret and loss. Paul Hong unloads animals, superheroes, Korean children, and a Native elder onto the landscape of Toronto with an ample store of his characteristic, and unexpected, style. The stories use a blend of hearsay, folklore, and opaque traditions to examine the everyday mysteries and the magic buried within the mundane.

Your Love Is Murder or the Case of the Mangled Pie

Hong, Paul

Short Stories & Anthologies

Erotic and wry, the poems in this collection are a firsthand tour through the world of a modern woman for whom desire is no longer a dirty word. The poet explores where the sensual woman has been and where she is going—a journey that belies the complex voices that inherit the lines of the poems, presenting both the confidence and vulnerability of sexually-empowered women who are put in the position of second-guessing their escape from stereotypes and societal expectations. Exploitation becomes a badge of honor for the women of the poems, with acerbic humor and commentary that entertain but strike an emotional resonance nonetheless.

A Thousand Profane Pieces

Wallin, Myna

<p>Featuring 28 stories by Canadian authors that encompass everything from madmen and spirits to poltergeists and spooks, this anthology is by turns witty, eerie, and frightening. The tales reveal writers that grapple with ghosts and all the other denizens of the unknown in unexpected ways, pinning them to the page with words to haunt readers. Every story is as unique as the dark shadows of each author’s imagination—the place where all supernatural stories begin.</p>

In the Dark: Stories from the Supernatural

Genre Fiction

Playing with genre and form, this poetry collection evokes a fantastical dream world as myth intersects with reality in verse. Themes of role reversal, shape-shifting, and gender-bending occur throughout, giving a feminist edge to this collection of poems replete with dark humor—as well as an unexpected ending. Whether running with the wolves, or sleeping with them, the poet uses sly words to turn everyday conventions inside out.

The Animal Bridegroom

Sandra Kasturi

<p>Love and loss, two frequently exhausted themes of poetry, find fresh life under the pen of poet Ian Burgham. Through the poems in this collection, sadness and solitude become lenses for viewing the world’s beauty, and love is a territory that humanity maps with little skill. Indeed the very core of humanity is explored in the poems, set against the Canadian literary landscape and frequently returning to distances—those imposed upon oneself by desire or loss—and motifs of conversation. Approachable but affecting, the poems of this collection raise questions, and anwers for them, that the reader did not know they had. </p>

The Stone Skippers

Burgham, Ian

Crafted over 12 years of writing and covering 40 years of experience, this collection of poetry shares the poet’s remembrances of falling out of a tree, days at his cottage, falling in and out of love, and the death of his father. Employing both humor and surreal elements, the poems take place in a real world that is made new again—and is perhaps not quite as real the second time around. The four sections in the book shift subjects from childhood and youth to the development of self and interpersonal relationships, and from maturity, loss, and the falling from sought-after heights to the poet’s relationship with his father. The poems in this debut collection take shape using various poetic forms, including free verse, prose, the ghazal, and a new poetic form created by the poet that he calls a “Title Poem.”

Eating Fruit Out of Season

Clink, David Livingstone

After the Fires

Pflug, Ursula

Contemporary

Young lovers tangle, tumble, and dance their way through the urban landscape of the poems in this collection. They lose and rediscover each other in cafés and bars, over latte or beer, while the city watches and waits for solitude to reassert itself. The three sections of the collection, "Impossible Permanence," "Tonic & Brevity," and "Litany of Desire," allude to the darker undercurrent that adds the taint of reality to these poems of spring and beauty. As the poet suggests with her title, the book is one to be opened slowly, savored like a surprise gift from a lover who will inevitably be forgotten, even while the gift remains.

Open Slowly

Furlong, Dayle

Romance

The I.V. Lounge Reading Series was a Toronto staple and a hub for the arts over the span of a decade. Every other Friday, fiction writers read alongside poets, whether emerging or established talent, local authors or tourists. In the relaxed, familiar atmosphere of the long-established literary tradition, some of the best writers from Canada and abroad passed through and contributed their voices to Toronto history. The ambiance of the I.V. Lounge readings is captured in this collection of the 29 best pieces from the last five years of the reading series. The featured writers are Steve McOrmond, Alexandra Leggat, Carmine Starnino, Shaun Smith, Evie Christie, Michael Bryson, Rob Winger, Matthew J. Trafford, David Livingstone Clink, Alayna Munce, Leigh Kotsilidis, Heather J. Wood, Matthew Tierney, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Michael V. Smith, Andrew Daley, Sharon McCartney, Goran Simic, Emily Shultz, Catherine Graham, Moez Surani, Molly Peacock, Jessica Westhead, Sue Sinclair, Ray Hsu, James Grainger, Dani Couture, Stacey May Fowles, and Karen Solie.

I.V. Lounge Nights

History & Criticism

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