New Book Releases
From Conundrum Press
The Hole Show by Maya Merrick
Following the critical success of her debut novel, Sextant, Maya Merrick’s The Hole Show is a multi-layered, finely crafted, provocative novel about four characters struggling to cope with their own personal transformations.
“The Hole Show is Maya Merrick’s second novel and is a toothsome trawl through Montreal vérité. There are freaks, deformities, and what used to be called clubfoots, all in a Henry Darger-esque jamboree. It is the world of Sextant, Merrick’s first book, plus a little of the historical sweep of Michel Tremblay complete with silverfish crawling up from the drains. The Hole Show really crackles across its 360 pages.” — Montreal Review of Books
the great hopeful someday by Elisabeth Belliveau
the great hopeful someday is the updated version of Belliveau’s popular collection of zine work called Something to pet the cat about. It includes three new zines and comes with a DVD of her animations. The DVD contains animations she has been working on for the past few years while attending residencies at The Banff Centre, the NFB (Montreal), The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture, and Struts Gallery in Sackville New Brunswick. The animations included here are: the great hopeful someday, perfect, and anchor your heart. The materials used are old gloves, costume jewellery, plasticine, office stationery and craft paper which makes these ethereal animations feel like her zines come to life. The book contains Belliveau’s most recent zines which were produced during her travels: four days in new york, don’t stop getting better (Sackville), and italy. Her finely inked images and text packed with nostalgia, which explore the beautiful in the mundane, have already received high praise:
“Every page takes my breath away, quickly and easily. I love the writing, and the artwork, the exquisite imagery, the seashells and the time, the thought, the effort put into drawing.” — Broken Pencil
Seven openings of the Head by Liane Keightley
Seven Openings of the Head is a collection of stories set primarily in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Amid a landscape of train tracks, rural roads and lakes, men and women wrestle with the subtleties of emotional entanglement and isolation. Wryly funny and richly empathetic, these stories explore the murky terrain of both familial and romantic love.
From Snare Books
Thumbscrews by Natalie Zina Walschots
Snare’s 2007 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry Winner!
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or McNally Robinson
Thumbscrews is a poetic engagement with the aesthetics of sadomasochism and consensual pain. It employs the techniques of mannerist poetry to constrain language as ropes, cuffs, or shackles that might be used to constrain the body. Each poem can be taken as a miniature sadomasochistic encounter where language is tied up, beaten, and twisted into submission. This book abuses language; language begs for it.
Thumbscrews engages with the sexual subculture of BDSM in content as well as in form. It explores the erotic ’scene’ and the prevalence of role-playing in the kinky bedroom, examines various settings as ‘pervertable’ locations, and chronicles a series of embarrassing trips to the emergency room. Poems are shaped from the hobbled language of email, visual representations of pain, and odes to various implements. Thumbscrews is a dirty-minded, sticky-fingered book.
About the author:
Natalie Zina Walschots recently completed her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. She serves as the Managing Editor for filling Station and is the co-organizer of the Flywheel reading series. She has also served as the Managing Editor for dANDelion. Her work has recently appeared in Matrix and The Capilano Review. Sections of Thumbscrews have appeared as the No Press chapbooks Passion Play and Christening.
FAKE MATH by ryan fitzpatrick
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“Moments are the elements of profit.” - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1
Composed primarily through the co-optation and recombination of internet search results, FAKE MATH is a poetic intervention into the ways the motive for profit structures our lives. Each poem exposes the fallacies, fake logics, and sheer idiocies that constrict our decision-making processes in terms of our art, industry, educational system, and our day-to-day lives, while questioning our tendency to resort to institutionalized social violence. FAKE MATH draws its inspiration from diverse sources from Marx to Freud, from Archimedes to Oprah, sending them all downstream on rapidly pulsating waves of schizophrenic glee and political gravity, often creating startling juxtapositions when mismatched ideas and images are torn from their original contexts. The effects are at once humorous and stomach-churning. Ultimately, these are poems about how we live, work, and play within larger structures of capitalism and how our attempts to move past these structures are largely failed attempts at rebellion, not real attempts at revolution or, better yet, escape.
About the author:
Born and raised in Calgary, ryan fitzpatrick is a founding editor of (orange) magazine and a past editor and board member of filling Station magazine. His poetry has been published across Canada, most notably the anthologies Post-Prairie (2005, Talonbooks, Eds. Robert Kroetsch and Jon Paul Fiorentino) and Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (2005, Mercury Press, Eds. derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, and a. rawlings). FAKE MATH is his first full-length collection of poems.
the small blue by Jay MillAr
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What is the small blue? It is a condition. It is a fragmented mood disorder. It includes impressions, forgotten bits, broken lyricism, biographical sketches. All of which culminates into the small blue – a feeling, or perhaps the distant translation of a feeling; the literal translation of an obscure line from Apollinaire: le petit bleu. A lyric state, a meditation that moves backward, an exercise in psychic time. What is the small blue? It is a book of fragments.
About the author:
Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of False Maps for Other Creatures, Mycological Studies and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr. Most recently he published Double Helix, a collaborative novel written with Stephen Cain. He is the figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to cutting edge work by well-known and emerging North American writers, as well as Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. He currently teaches creative writing at George Brown College.
From WithWords
Three new titles from the innovative and creative Montreal chapbook press
Taking Names by Hillary Rexe
Taking Names is a collection of poetry that will steal your socks. Hillary Rexe writes through informed speakers who give only glimpses into their lives, trying to address the mundane nature of loneliness and weakness in more abstract ways in order to bring light to the every day. A dark self-aware sense of humour and vivid details show a truth, however small, in each speaker, character and poem. Rexe’s characters live on the periphery of society and yet the truth in Taking Names is universal. These poems are sneaky in their attempt to reveal honesty, though you would be advised to not call them sneaky, what with all the sock-stealing.
About the author:
Hillary Rexe was born in Toronto, grew up in Vancouver and now calls Montreal home. She is currently completing her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Rexe has an odd affection for giraffes. Taking Names is her first collection of poetry.
Slip Limbed by Marianne Perron
In Slip Limbed, strikingly vivid images are placed among tongue-twisters and tinsel. Bold language is sewn together with taffy and rhinestones, apricots and patent shoes, giving the appearance of a haphazard suitcase filled for a spontaneous trip. Upon closer inspection, however, you realise the sting hides beneath the pretty things, where dark humour, ironic allusions and a tangle of wit are sewn into the luxe linings. Each poem will leave you feeling fashionable and naked, a sting of pearls on your lips.
About the Author:
Marianne Perron, originally from Montreal, is a student of Concordia University’s Creative Writing program. Slip Limbed is her first collection of poetry.
Pants with Pockets by Chris Masson
A belligerent, ranting drunk, daring you to punch him; a wistful romantic, a rhyming manchild, and a cocky comedian. Chris Masson is all these things, and Pants with Pockets takes joy in shuffling from one to the other like a card shark. These are funny, often moving structured free-verse poems that always pay close attention to form and musicality. Masson’s words are sweet and supple in your mouth like bubble gum; you can snap them, chew them, pop them and they will never lose their flavour.
About the author:
Chris Masson grew up outside of Montreal. He now grows inside of Montreal. He is an actor, poet and performer. He is currently taking a year off from his studies in English at Concordia University to tour Eastern Canada with a children’s theatre company. He is also working on a solo spoken-word showcase and another collection of poems.
From Coach House
Sitcom by David McGimpsey
Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy.
Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself – through antic turns and lyric flips to demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – to a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom’s strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week’s episode.
About the author:
David McGimpsey was born and raised in Montreal. He has a PhD in English Literature and is the author of the award-winning study Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press 2000). His travel writings frequently appear in the Globe and Mail and he writes the ‘Sandwich of the Month’ column for EnRoute magazine. He teaches at Concordia University. McGimpsey has published three previous collections of poetry: Lardcake (ECW Press 1996), Dogboy (ECW Press 199 
and Hamburger Valley, California (ECW Press 2001), in addition to a collection of short fiction: Certifiable (Insomniac Press 2004).
From Tin House
Skateboarder, restaurant worker, and punk rocker wannabe, the antihero of Jeff Parker’s uproariously funny debut novel adds a new twist to the classic coming-of-age story. When Thinfinger, a ne’er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold, relies on Post-it notes to help him make sense of the chaos and momentum of his life: a girlfriend who dreams he murders her, a long lost Biodad who writes letters filled with lies, a televised war that is over before it has even begun, and a robbery he can’t remember committing.
“Ovenman is a welcome addition to the literature of the lovably hapless by a young writer with talent to burn.”
—George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation
“This novel really cooks. Read it tonight.”
—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories
About the author:
Jeff Parker is the Chief Operations Officer and Russia Program Director for the Summer Literary Seminars. His fiction, nonfiction, and hypermedia have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, Hobart, The Iowa Review, and other publications. His cycle of stories The Back of the Line in collaboration with artist William Powhida will be released by DECODE Art Publishers in the Fall of 2007. For his work in hypermedia, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. He co-edited the essay collection Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) with Mikhail Iossel. He has a BA in Journalism from the University of Florida and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University, where he directs the interdisciplinary MA program.
