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 readingThe 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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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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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, […]
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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 […]
Continue readingFalling – 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 […]
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Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this territory.
