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Awful Gesturesby Adrienne Weiss
Insomniac Press 2002; US$ 7.95Wallace Stevens' torrid words serve as both epigraph and incantation for Adrienne Weiss's powerful debut collection. Like Stevens, the poet acts as an intuitive observer and an almost violently acute mystic throughout these extravagant poems. more...
Balance Actby Ken Cormier
Insomniac Press 2002; US$ 9.99Balance Act is Ken Cormier's first published collection of prose and poetry. Ranging in mood from all-out hilarity to heart-stopping melancholy, Balance Act utilizes a consistent thread of music and rhythm to propel its language. Cormier's extensive background in percussion informs his writing at every level of the process. Simply put, Cormier brings performance to the page, and Balance Act is his one-man variety show. Cormier's stories peel back the layers of a bent suburban landscape, and his characters scratch and claw to find inspiration on the railroad tracks, to bear the absurdity of family dysfunction, to trade the bitterness of complacency for the thrill of total annihilation. The poems reinforce his over-arching themes, punctuating... more...
Beneath the Beautyby Phlip Arima
Insomniac Press 1996; US$ 9.95Beneath the Beauty is Philip Arima's first collection of poetry. His work is gritty and rhythmic, passionate and uncompromising. His writing reveals themes like love, life on the street and addiction. Arima has a terrifying clarity of vision in his portrayal of contemporary life. Despite the cruelties inflicted and endured by his characters, he is able to find a compassionate element even in the bleakest of circumstances. more...
Creamsicle Stick Shivby John Stiles
Insomniac Press 2006; US$ 9.95John Stiles' first collection of poetry, Scouts Are Cancelled, explored the dialect and the dilemmas of down-home life in Nova Scotia's rural Annapolis Valley. In his second collection, the poet expands his horizons. Chronicling his movements from Canada's east coast to Toronto's self-obsessed urban core, following his heart around the world to find love and employment in England, these poems resonate with profound ideas and offbeat observations on people and place, on the variables that combine to create a person's identity, and what it means to leave, to seek, and to desire a home. more...
Damagedby Phlip Arima
Insomniac Press 1998; US$ 9.95Phlip Arima is one of Toronto's most popular performance poets. In Damaged, his second collection of poetry, Arima takes to the street to create his portraits of the lost, the dispossessed and the disenchanted. Edgy, yet deeply compassionate, Arima's poems capture the gritty urban reality of the homeless and the mad, in desperate contrast to the easy slogans of TV ads and store window displays. His question remains, ''What happened to make them this way?'' At the heart of this powerful collection is an extended poem, '09-06-96, Eulogy for Chris', a bittersweet memoir of a friend and lover, filled with grief and anger at her loss. But there have been other suicides, other deaths ? from AIDS, from drugs, and from sheer loneliness. Powered by... more...
Early Poemsby A.F. Moritz
Insomniac Press 2002; US$ 15.95A.F. Moritz is the author of thirteen books of poetry, numerous chapbooks and limited edition volumes. He has received major honours including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His book Rest on the Flight into Egypt was nominated for the 2000 Governor General's Award. In the Blackwells Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Moritz is one of four major Canadian poets discussed as having emerged since Ondaatje and Atwood. more...
Exstatic Almanacby AWOL Love Vibe
Insomniac Press 2002; US$ 9.99Exstasy: too little leaves you gutless and stunted. Too much and you've got the Exstatic Almanac; 365 exstatic poems for the sublime year. These poems are signposts on the road to revolutionary ruin and radical redemption. They are at once the record of an improvisatory exstasy and the imaginative impetus for the implosion of your psyche. In the ancient tradition of divinatory calendars, the Exstatic Almanac shreds the year to come - a how-to book for millennial prophets, teenage cyber-mutants, and literary thrill seekers. more...
Gardening in the Tropicsby Olive Senior
Insomniac Press 2005; US$ 9.95Gardening in the Tropics contains a rich Caribbean world in poems offered to readers everywhere. Olive Senior's rich vein of humour can turn wry and then sharp in satire of colour-consciousness, class-consciousness and racism. But her predominant tone is the verbal equivalent of a pair of wide-open arms. more...
Late Capitalist Sublimeby Ryan Kamstra
Insomniac Press 2002; US$ 7.95lATE cAPITALIST sUBLIME marks the début of Ryan Kamstra, heir apparent to the dissenting tradition in Canadian poetry. Thematically echoing overtly political poets such as Milton Acorn, F.R. Scott and Dorothy Livesay, Kamstra's streetwise poetry bears witness to a superficial world, which is relieved only by the occasional glimmer of a resilient human spirit. more...
Mental Hygieneby Ray Robertson
Insomniac Press 2003; US$ 16.95One of today's best young novelists, Ray Robertson is also one of its ablest critics. Mental Hygiene is a collection of his most entertaining, insightful, controversial, and funniest reviews and essays written over the last five years. Believing that ''writers have a responsibility to help maintain the mental hygiene of their time,'' Robertson, following in the footsteps of Mordecai Richler and other novelist-critics such as Anthony Burgess, Kingsley and Martin Amis and John Updike, is at the front line of contemporary literary debate. Whether castigating the bland cabal he refers to as McCanlit, poking fun at the trendy ephemera of intellectual fashion or arguing for his own unique fictional aesthetic, Robertson pulls no punches and suffers... more...