An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers. Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police ...

The Hard Return is a broken list of metaphors for the human heart. Or its a troubling elegy for a disposable world. Alternating between loving descriptions of 21st century excess and awkward social situations, Marcus McCanns poems are sincere and ironic, sad and half-joking, often in the same instant.

Half wisecracking tour guide and half flirtatious trick, the poems in Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe examine how we respond to overwork, anxiety, and overstimulation. McCann’s third collection speaks to a world that is too busy and too anxious, delivering the material with zero reverence and with loads of self-deprecating, disarming, observational—and sometimes catty—humour. Inviting readers to be his “bandmates / on life’s slutty bus tour,” Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe marks a fresh...

An intimate look at one of culture's most enduring taboos: public sex.Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers. Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann's ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police ...

Bent at the Spine offers a 'pronoun'-ced frolic where the "you" is a disconnected third party - the reader is left in the position of an eavesdropper, or a listener, or a karmasurplus author. Its relentless interrogation resonates at an invigorating pace: cultural difference, different bodies, diffident accents, deafening rhymes. Sometimes rapturous, often vulvy, the poems audaciously teach "you" how to read them, allowing the last-minute-cram-session to be a delving, a plunging, ...

In 2,700 words and eight illustrations, an ordinary chicken finds himself in an awkward situation and needs to get away—fast. He soon discovers he is inventive, smart, and sneaky enough to become a temporary zombie (and a stylish one), a magician of dazzling feathers, and a half-mastermind hero.Suitable for all readers who wonder how far nonsense can go while enjoying a ridiculous series of events.

Poetry of ambivalence, humour, and doubt that belies a kind of optimismDumpster fires outside discount stores and rotting whale carcasses; optical illusions and memento mori—all “coming to you direct, / by way of this Rube Goldberg machine.” Failure to Thrive zigzags through excess, taking in the big picture through the lens of a pinhole camera. These poems ask us to lean into our senses, to “spend time loitering, slipping coins into attention’s slots, / anticipating the n...

Lean but brawny, reminiscent but edgy, these poems recall boyhood, fatherhood, and manhood. With tones of regret, dark humor, and poignant beauty, Henderson's contemporary verse appeals to poets and non-poets alike.

Named a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review, Sun in Days is “O’Rourke’s most ravishing and brilliant collection yet” (Cathy Park Hong).From acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. These formally ambitious poems and lyric essays give voice to the experience of illne...

Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and 'natural' spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. Theseare little ominous films, documenti...

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks Deft with mat...

A clear voice of her generation, Sierra DeMulder’s writing offers a gritty, sincere perspective on the subtle joys and modern pains of living. Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder’s personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms. DeMulder possesses the most important quality a young writer can h...