Stuart Ross's eighth collection of poems delivers a gallery of emotionally charged poetry experiments along with a series of philosophical meditations on the aesthetically contrived and sometimes downright quirky poetic processes that were followed to generate the poems in this book. A Hamburger in a Gallery is deeply engaged in demonstrating how art happens, especially through a poet's immediate aesthetic engagement with other works of art. Comprised of poems written 'after' the lines and language of other artists' works, 'during' sessions of listening to other poets reading their poems, or constructed 'from' the parts and pieces of other artists' words, A Hamburger in a Gallery provides a distinctive experience of the relationship between the finished poem and the process that informed its creation. Blurring the boundaries between creative writing and creative reading, Ross has once again created an utterly original, accessible, moving and avant-garde classic. 'Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry.' George Murray, The Globe & Mail

Poetry. "As Paul Pines moves through two cities he reminds us that 'we go where we must to find / what we need.' And what he finds is plenty plenty in all senses and for all the senses. From poems that hang out in the crazy costumes, poignant hilarities, and irreverent reverences of Mardi Gras, to those that fly with hermes over the roofs of Paris, explore light with Monet and Pissarro, and walk graveyards in the wake of Apollinaire this book brims, seethes, teems, with qi, duende, life. Here is a magnanimity of vision that touches myths, rituals and philosophies, that garners pasts, presences and absences, that engenders probabilities, realities and impossibilities. Encompassing space-travel, dream-travel and mind-travel, here is an immense, vibrant, moving canvas." Richard Berengarten"

Momentous did they seem? Not now, so still / They are, are, are, are, are, the things I see / And will be when they're lost, obliterated, / The model passed away, On this old empty vase glazed patterns dance, / Above it fixed wings beat, the migrants' flight. / Good morning, present, absent ones, good night. (from Ave Atque Vale (p. 84).

"Lines that make me want to have sex on the moon."-Thurston Moore Cɶur de Lion is a book-length epistolary love poem that directly addresses a recently lost "you"--in accessible tones yet with extreme erudition and fierce intellect--but that also directly addresses the work of poetic address, how it shifts when the you shifts from a literal recipient, through loss, to poetry itself: art form, tradition; soul-catching medium. It's libidinal, heartful, hot with the memory of what was libidinal and heartfelt and hot. It's also a cult classic: self-published in 2007 and available now to an audience who will recognize the deep influence it has had on contemporary poets and poetry. " Scathing and meek, furious and thoughtful, reckless and careful, brave and frightened , Cɶur de Lion is something you've never seen before that you already know by heart."-- Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket "A book of frank witty poetry that makes me laugh, cry, throw things ."-- Lena Dunham "She is in me now like a hot virus and i am smitten."-- Melissa Broder "In Cɶur de Lion the erotics of power and powerlessness are not opposites--they flirt and morph and clash into a brilliant blast of poetic energy . I saw Ariana read from this book at UC Berkeley, and the walls of the academy rumbled. I fucking love this book ." -- Dodie Bellamy "At the time we thought Cɶur de Lion a more comfortable book than The Cow , for it is, after all, a 'love poem' no matter how perverse, but as I look at it again I'm struck by how fierce its valences are, how intransigent its anti-nationalism. Already I think of Reines' work in art as dividing, like Picasso's, into periods, and if this is the rose period it is also the time in which blood rained down on the peoples' heads. Asked for the history of a certain sort of public sex, I mumble that there was Zabriskie Point , and then there was Peter Hujar, and there was Cɶur de Lion. " -- Kevin Killian

"Eclectic poems wherein the author makes unapologetic leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd"--

Poetry. Jewish Studies. "The ruins of Lifta, an archeological site of incalculable value outside Jerusalem is a nexus of 'irreconcilable stories.' To the stones of Lifta and their compelling mute testimony, Kaminsky has bent his poet's ear, transcribing for us their urgent, mournful, bitter and aggrieved voices that witness to the layers of memory and history here. As the poet was summoned to Lifta, this probing and timely book summons the reader with blunt, contentious dialogues, daring and tender monologues, striking allegories, and always, the piercing questions that, seemingly unanswerable, must continue to be asked in the pursuit of understanding and justice."--Jeanne Marie Beaumont

A 99-year-old Beat-era novelist is reactivated into writing when his sons send him poems by US Mail. Thus begins Father Verses Sons, a stunning poetic correspondence about life and death, and about men bumbling towards love

Fiction. Drama. "There are phone lines to the living and others for calling the dead. TELEPHONE by Ariana Reines is a network for riveting acts of speech, and silence, and listening. I saw the play and never forgot it. The audience was lit like a switchboard by its storms of courage and mystical love."--Rachel Kushner "TELEPHONE is an uncanny parcel of theater in which the wishes of humans to speak with the dead meet the limits or the aspirations of technology. A woman wrapped in language is deemed insane and the lonely pastness of our present walks around calling for itself. TELEPHONE is a whild and visionary piece of art that announced to me a poet who is always tearing the future open like a trapped animal--their eyes reflect us. Don't look! We mus. Bless you and love you Ariana for this great work."--Eileen Myles "I have been WAITING FOR THIS BOOK! When I saw it in the theater every word motion fell into magic stride utterly taxing the soul with its accuracy and mystery. The next night I was at the box office with a different friend and needed to return to my job is the only thing that kept me from the theater a third night. Examine for yourself the bewitching and sometimes misshapen communicative powers of life with the poetry goddess of the stage, Ariana Reines!-- CA Conrad "TELEPHONE, the inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play, probes feelings with the sensitivity and detachment of a heart surgeon."--Ben Brantley, The New York Times

VI give me time I said and note my grace in loving you let me divide and ornament you touch you above and below circle around your key note enter your fifth dimension and perfect your cadence let me feel your greater and lesser thirds modulate your modes and minor your majors VII I want to trill your renaissance way beginning sure and supreme on your given, written note and flirt my way across distance to the note above taking you into history with me in dissonance Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection excels in the richness of its subject matter, the witty and sensuous language, the musicality of its rhythms and the way in which she is able to combine sophistication with accessibility. She is as comfortable with Italian Renaissance music as she is with the poignancy of the history of Europe's Jewish populations. Her retelling of the "Book of Esther" is a tour de force of Midrashic free-form poetry, and her speculation on Shakespeare's "Dark Lady of the Sonnets" is a tribute to both Elizabethan poetry and a mischievous imagination.

In the pages of Gary Barwin's latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world. Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us - that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of "nature" and "the animal." As philosophical as it is entertaining - weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more - No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.

Presents a collection of poems that focus on the themes of aging, loss, and death.

"Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from the poet's earliest childhood memories to the surprises that come with age"--

Allen Grossman's newest work Descartes' Loneliness blends the comic and tragic. As the writer Ha Jin once wrote, it is "remarkable for the stout spirit of the speaker who dares to be funny while tackling such an austere subject as death." Poems such as "The Famished Dead," where the poet is visited by lost loved ones, "one at a time," confirm Jorie Graham's observation that "from the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry to be heard--Grossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent."

what if the rain referred to something else? and bowling and shoes were done with the mouth? Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas. The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language's luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland. not everyone is a poet my dog for instance.

The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs take multiple positions. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs don't trust your grandmother's cooking. They have visited Pangea, they have visited Toronto and Montreal, the B.C. Gulf Islands, Tiberias, the tailing ponds near Sudbury, and they are still not satisfied, are still unconvinced, still need more proof. They are suckers for dovetailed boxes, winter fire pits, houses that sit not quite true, a rent garbage bag spilling its guts on Queen Street. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs have some choice words for Orpheus, for Eurydice, for Beowulf, fro Dumbledore and Hermione. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs are devoid of hope, but are joyful nonetheless.