An obsessive perfectionist, Samuel Andreyev inhabits several worlds: he writes in English while living in France; he is an internationally known composer, performer, and teacher; and he is an experimental poet who documents words, phrases, and rhetorical devices while staying true to the fundamental tools of classical poetry. A 49th Shelf “Most Anticipated 2015 Fall […]
Continue readingTag Archives: experimental poetry
Fall Poetry PREVIEW: Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina by Shannon Maguire
Following her ambitious and otherworldly debut, fur(l) parachute (BookThug, 2013), Shannon Maguire returns with Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina (available now). Part two in a planned medievalist trilogy, Myrmurs seizes upon the twelfth-century poetic form of the sestina as a starting point for an exploration of living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; the agency of ant colonies; […]
Continue readingIntroducing BookThug’s Fall 2015 Season!
As we approach the ides of August, thoughts turn to the Fall 2015 literary season. BookThug is proud to present a stellar lineup of adventurous new books, with fiction from Jess Taylor, Josh Massey, and Jean Marc Ah-Sen, poetry from Liz Worth, Brian Dedora, Steven Ross Smith, Samuel Andreyev, and Shannon Maguire, as well as a […]
Continue readingHighlights from BookThug’s spring/summer events: Guest blogger Emma Hambly on her time interning at BookThug
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 readingIn Conversation: Lisa Gordon speaks to her new chapbook, Moving In With the Dalai Lama
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 […]
Continue readingIn Conversation: Helen Guri discusses her new chapbooks, Here Come the Waterworks and Microphone Lessons for Poets
This month BookThug is launching two chapbooks by poet Helen Guri. Of her poetry chapbook Here Come the Waterworks, Helen writes, “Here come the waterworks” is in most contexts an accusation that someone is about to cry profusely in order to manipulate people. But since anyone who is paying attention ought to be crying profusely […]
Continue readingSpring poetry PREVIEW: three poems from Jake Kennedy’s forthcoming collection Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play
In 1981 Jake Kennedy accidentally burnt down an abandoned house. Years later, as an adult, he read a story about how the German artist Kurt Schwitters’ “interior house-sculpture” (“Merz Structure No. 2”) was destroyed in 1951 after some children playing with matches accidentally burnt the building down. This sad ‘unmaking’ became the inspiration for Merz […]
Continue readingSpring poetry PREVIEW: a Q&A with Jimmy McInnes, author of A More Perfect [
On March 18, 2008, at the height of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama delivered his famous “A More Perfect Union” speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was an iconic moment in an already memorable campaign that had seen the meteoric rise of then-candidate Obama from bright […]
Continue readingSpring poetry PREVIEW: Introducing Lesley Battler and her spectacular full-length debut, Endangered Hydrocarbons
Selected by BookThug’s poetry editor Phil Hall, Lesley Battler’s first full-length collection of poems Endangered Hydrocarbons developed out of the author’s experience as an employee of Shell Canada, a subsidiary of the multinational Shell Oil Ltd. and one of Canada’s largest integrated oil companies. It was while working at Shell that Battler found herself utterly bombarded by […]
Continue readingSpring fiction PREVIEW: Steve McCaffery’s Adventures in Plunderland
It’s February, you guys. Here at BookThug HQ in Toronto, Canadian identity has been asserting itself (predictably) in the form of The Weather. All over North America, rodent-based fortune telling rituals have been performed and the inevitable has been announced: that winter will end and spring will come. Which means that an entire spring season of […]
Continue reading