Take a seat in (the) Waiting Room, the first full-length collection of poetry from award-winning writer Jennifer Zilm. Featured in the CBC Books Spring 2016 Books Preview Selection, and named one of 49th Shelf’s Most Anticipated Spring 2016 Poetry books, Zilm’s work takes us into waiting rooms of all kinds. Featuring a mélange of styles and
Continue reading »Dear blog readers: my name is Emma Hambly and I’m here this week to give a small recap of my time at BookThug. My master’s program at Ryerson allowed us to complete our degree with a placement at a creative company, and I was lucky enough to intern at BookThug. I spent an engrossing two
Continue reading »The poems of Moving In With the Dalai Lama, the debut chapbook by Lisa Gordon, hide in the interstices of language, and are anchored in the tentative relationships that surround us—so in a sense they aren’t anchored at all. A poetics of indeterminacy is here, a call & response as in ghazals, yet a call
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Thirteen Ways of Looking at CanLit, the new chapbook by Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Rachel Rose burns fiercely in its righteous fury at the unbridled misogyny, homophobia and racism that is quietly condoned in our literary community. Here, critical bigotry becomes a tool of analysis, a text in which Rachel Rose romps and riffs, deconstructs and
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In Robert Anderson’s debut chapbook The Hospital Poems, the ward becomes the world, becomes the word, becomes the war. Drawing the reader into the strained intimacies of hospital halls and personal and social breakdown, Anderson’s fragmented, fragmenting poems are “spills/spells of narrative” that brilliantly sabotage the institutional from the inside. Selected for BookThug’s Summer Chapbook
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Who is kevin mcpherson eckhoff, aka kme, aka KMac? Poet? Performer? Beloved trickster of the Canadian conceptual poetry scene? BFF of Jake Kennedy? He is most certainly the author of three books of poetry, including Rhapsodomancy (Coach House Books, 2010), Easy Peasy (Invisible Publishing, 2011) and Forge (Invisible Publishing, 2013). His chapbook, Game Show Reversed,
Continue reading »While I was writing [Laws of Rest], I felt that all language was alive…I don’t get too concerned with how my work fits together—I just try to explore fully whatever compels me, and hope that I end up in a place I didn’t anticipate. —David B. Goldstein David B. Goldstein is one of BookThug’s three
Continue reading »Falling – not always a dropping to the ground construed as rhyme not death not a literal fall or heartbreak instead (but) any other form of respective bending. – “A General Tale” Sandra Ridley composes silence, a considered hush, and a tension so taut that it hums. – rob mclennan Sanrda Ridley’s most recent collection
Continue reading »( The valley carries cemeteries in its mouth, grounds sound to seed and buries it – there is a world and the world inside it – ) –“Once Sun” So everything is light once we learn to see by it. To honor the field we should “leave the field,” but this book we should never
Continue reading »“This is it. Here. Right now.” Michael Blouin’s dream of happiness Michael Blouin is one of BookThug’s two Fall fiction authors, whose book I Don’t Know How to Behave is labeled simply “A Fiction,” landing, as it does, in some happy grey area between a novel and poetry. It’s not poetry, though. It’s a
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