A genre-bending retelling of The Odyssey, Army of the Brave and Accidental is a modern fable: a story about relationships, parenthood, and trying to have an impact on the world told from the shifting perspectives of ten characters. A hundred years after James Joyce stitched together a version of the epic tale, Canadian writer and essayist Alex Boyd updates the story as a reflection of Canadian twenty-first-century culture, allowing it to take a radically differen...

Pulling from twenty-five years of essays, articles, and reviews, Alex Boyd’s Take This for the Pain is a curious look at art and culture in a rapidly changing world. Boldly tackling topics ranging from faith to aging to work in factories and bookshops, Boyd’s work finds inspiration in the philosophies of writers like George Orwell, William Stafford, and Charlotte Brontë. If you’ve ever wondered about the value of poetry in the 21st century, or whether graffiti is a valid art form, Take Thi...

The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather’s letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he’s still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, an...

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes), shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to a...

The invasion of the future has begun.Literary legends including Steven Millhauser, Junot Diáz, Amiri Baraka, and Katharine Dunn have attacked the borders of the every day. Like time traveling mad-scientists, they have concocted outrageous creations from the future. They have seized upon tales of technology gone wrong and mandated that pulp fiction must finally grow up.In these wildly-speculative stories you will discover the company that controls the world from an alley in ...

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me*The parade for the slain police officergoes past the bakeryand the smell of fresh breadmakes the mourners salivate against their will.*—from "Note to Reality"Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our for...

If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a...

Jim Harrison's first novel—a walk on the wild side from "a force of nature in American letters" ( The Seattle Times).The *New York Times–*bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Praised as "a raunchy, funny, swaggering, angry, cocksure b...

Like the laundry that greets readers at the start of Anita Laheys astonishing debuthanging on clothelines and bodied out in breezesthe poems in Out to Dry in Cape Breton exist in a state of thrumming levitation. Laheys scampish play with idioms, her accelerated sense of traditional forms, and her omnivorous eye for fresh imagery lead to a poetry constantly streaming with surprises. These are musical, hyperstimulated, shape-shifting poems that draw on their subjectsa high diver, World War I...

In her second collection of poetry, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine-grained and crude. With her unique and engaging voice that mixes pop culture, archaic mysticism, and inventiveness with lyric forms, these poems play with reality and fantasy, distorting perception, and are universal and personal at once.

"Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience."-Pulitzer Prize finalist citation"These poems are tough and witty."-The New Yorker"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo."-Time Out New YorkA 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Inseminating the Elephant delivers hard-...