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Indie Rock candidly focuses on a queer poet/musician's life in Newfoundland and his personal struggles with addiction, OCD, and trauma. This intelligent and punchy collection is steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. With an astute attention to form, rhythm, and aesthetics, Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story about an artist alienated from, but fascinated by, the world he inhabits. Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse. At its core, Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist's compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.Sales Tips: - Indie Rock is a lively new collection from a writer at the start of a strong literary career: a rhythmically savvy, modern, and unafraid queer voice.- Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story of a poet/musician from Newfoundland who is an addict struggling to stay clean while coping with a mental illness, a queer man often at odds with his slippery sexuality and torn apart by past traumas. He examines hookup culture quite openly, while also noting the dangers of sexual exploration and genderfluidity in towns bound by rigid religious codes and toxic masculinity.- The poet discusses relationships with both men and women, life with another musician who commits suicide, struggles with mental health and OCD, and the Newfoundland landscape and culture.- Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist's compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.- In the book, we witness a transformation of the bravado of Al Purdy into the raw honesty of Billy-Ray Belcourt. We see a translation of the delicacies of John Barton into the brutalities of early works by Michael Ondaatje. - It's a punchy and intelligent collection steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. - Indie Rock strikingly straddles a variety of divides and binaries and perceived divisions in the CanLit poetry landscape, all in productive ways. The book's poetics, for instance, mix traditional lyric free-verse with the sonic density common in many contemporary books. The text also uses narrative techniques, vernacular voices, and observational description. Similarly, the book engages Newfoundland as a regional site. >Audience: - Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse.- A contemporary readership interested in queer identity and sexuality; the struggles between addiction and faith; or discussions of OCD, suicide, grief, and the nature of imagination, will find this collection intriguing. - The book will certainly have a strong East Coast readership, due to the explorations of landscape and Newfoundland cadence and slang in the poems.

Sonja Ruth Greckol's Monitoring Station enters a slipstream of space and planetary language, circling time, embodying loss and longing, generating and regenerating in a faltering climate. Orbiting through a mother's death, a grandbaby's birth, and a pandemic summer, these poems loop and fragment in expansive and empathetic ways. The title poem locates a settler voice revisiting Treaties 6 and 7 and the Métis lands of her Alberta childhood, while the overall collection is tethered to Toronto shadowed by northland prairie. Nimble, energetic, and challenging, the book engages a dense kind of poetic thinking about belonging and responsibility to people and place, within both recent history and far-flung cosmic realities. Falling squarely within a Canadian feminist experimental lyric trajectory, and grounded in bodily, personal, and political experience, Monitoring Station embodies the passage of a damaged world across generations.Sales Tips: - Greckol is an established writer with three previous collections of poetry.- Monitoring Station is a Möbius strip of a book, navigating between the anchors of mothering/daughtering, a settler interrogation of place and history, and a chronicling of the fragmented first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. - Greckol purposefully engages a dense kind of poetic thinking to examine connections between what's come before, what's happening now, and what's coming next. - The book's stress on mothers and daughters and granddaughters is carefully partnered with a doubled view of our place, now, when settler cultures are finally being forced to think through their (our) own privileges, when COVID has highlighted the economic and structural inequalities existent in the setup of a global north vs. global south, and when climate change threatens to expose the blindness at the heart of contemporary capitalist systems. - Falling squarely within a Canadian feminist experimental lyric trajectory, and grounded in bodily, personal, and political experience, Monitoring Station embodies the passage of a damaged world across generations.>Audience: - It will appeal to readers of contemporary poetry who are attracted to conceptual, feminist, and eco-poetic models; to readers seeking to parse the pandemic in an intelligent, thoughtful way; to readers looking to interrogate their own place on treaty lands as settlers, or the violence enacted on BIPOC bodies around the world.- Readers will praise its attention to detail, celebrate its willingness to face difficult truths, and applaud its spirit of experimental lyricism.- The work is also connected to the central CanLit tradition of autobiographical free-verse lyricism.

In there's more, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike takes on the rich concepts of home and belonging: home lost and regained, home created with others and with the land, home as "anywhere we find something to love." Giving voice to the experiences of migrant and other marginalized citizens whose lives society tends to overlook, this collection challenges the oppressive systems that alienate us from one another and the land. Carefully built lyric meditations combine beauty and ugliness, engaging with violence, and displacement, while seeking to build kinship and celebrate imagination. Weaving domestic and international settings, salient observation and potent memory, Umezurike immerses the reader in rich, precise imagery and a community of voices, ideas, and recollections. there's more navigates immigrant life with a multifaceted awareness of joy, melancholia, loss, and hope.Sales Tips: -Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike takes on the rich concepts of home and belonging: home lost and regained, home created with others and with the land, home as "anywhere we find something to love."-The sense of longing that permeates the collection appeals to those who have had to leave a homeland behind, or whose ancestors have done the same, and who navigate their new lives with a multifaceted awareness of joy, melancholia, loss, and hope.-Umezurike examines themes of alienation, migration, citizenship, belonging, diaspora, and racial and social justice. -Some of the poems look at the realities of marginal lives in society; others explore questions about dispossession and the violence of extractive industries. -One of the great strengths of there's more is the poet's use of personal experience to present carefully arranged challenges to oppressive systems. -Umezurike's work connects with a long line of Canadian BIPOC poets who work within the autobiographical lyric form against monolithic, colonial notions of belonging, from George Elliott Clarke to Dionne Brand to Sky Dancer. -Weaving domestic and international settings, salient observation and potent memory, Umezurike immerses the reader in rich, precise imagery and a community of voices, ideas, and recollections.-The poet presents magnificently compact, moving, and beautiful lyric observations, combining well-shaped rhythms, images, and phrases with vernacular.-Umezurike interrogates the possibility (and the necessity) of holding multiple homes, and in a time of vastly increased displacement and immigration, this is a crucial topic. -Overall, the abiding question of the collection is how othering surfaces and perpetuates in our lives, in ways that alienate us from one another, from what it means to be human, and from the natural world that is our home. It also explores ways of building community. At the end of the day, it's a book that looks at what can be overcome in bringing people together, rather than pushing them apart.>Audience: -Readers of poetry and Canadian literature, particularly those who seek out, celebrate, and engage with autobiographical lyric work.-Readers who come from communities directly impacted by racism and their allies: the poems speak to issues of racial and social justice that fragment, as well as to a deep search for belonging and relationship.

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It's a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.

That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection--what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated problems: error, insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects such as fear and avoidance. "A Branch of Happen," the opening section of award-winning poet Margaret Christakos' collection, explores interior listening to both the self as sensation machine and the collaged external soundscape we both hear and fail to hear within the assailing violences and inequities of the news. A second suite, "Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk," is troubled by memories of deceased loved-ones amid the North Saskatchewan River valley and the many-layered history of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). The fragmentary "Listening Line Notebook" multiplies the treatment of listening as a situated perceptual, sensory, and ethical process. A final long poem called "The Incubation" navigates ideas of being asleep and awake, altered and attuned, as well as spiritually dis/located in time and space. Poised within and beyond both established and emergent traditions of ecocriticism, contemporary feminisms, and experimental lyric, this intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace.

Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace's confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives.