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
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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;
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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 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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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