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Bitar was born in Beirut, settled in Canada, studied and published in the U.S. and travelled widely, and his poetry addresses current geopolitical realities with an informed and idiosyncratic gaze. The book is firmly engaged, in complicated ways, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a look at the titles in the table of contents confirms: “Mission Creep,” “Power-Sharing Formula,” “Divide and Rule,” “Waterboarding,” “The Barricade Auction” etc. Bitar was a teaching/writing fellow at Iowa University in the early ‘90s, where he studied with John Ashbery, Heather McHugh, and Jorie Graham. Ashbery himself recommended his first full collection, 2 Guys on Holy Land, to the editors at Wesleyan University Press. Bitar has been widely published in journals across North America, including The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing and Maisonneuve.

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Steudel is a court reporter in Vancouver.Steudel has worked on this manuscript in numerous contexts for several years, her mentors including the likes of Erin Moure, Jen Currin and Carolyn Forche.The publication of New Theatre continues to advance Coach House’s commitment to the best experimental and feminist writers working in any genre, including Audre Lorde Prize winner Jen Currin, Trillium Poetry Prize winner Rachel Zolf, and Governor-General’s Award finalist and Poetry Chicago blogger Sina Queyras.

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Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven't ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet. Showing an uncanny access to the voice of the rejected, unimpressive, emotionally challenged modern male, Helen Guri's debut collection explores Robert's transition from lost and lonely to loved.

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In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity. Perhaps we won't figure it out and the horizon is already on fire, and our best love will never be more than an approximation of regret, but grass still grows between the cement blocks of the sidewalk to 'grin of the wild.'

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Jay used to have an ego, but had it surgically removed. Get bur'd by Alex Cayce; Perfectly Ordinary Dreams by James Llar; Short Ghosts by John Elliott; heartrants by H. Azel; and Book of Leaves by Conwenna Stokes: five books written in five radically different styles.

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The follow-up to the critically acclaimed No. 111, Fidget ruthlessly documents every movement made by Goldsmith's body on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997 from 10 am to 11 pm. Literary critic Marjorie Perloff compares Fidget to 'a Beckett prose text,' and says many witty and intelligent things about it in her afterword.

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This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky. Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. Sina Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt, and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome – each decision can make or unmake us.

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In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.

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Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie. Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Górecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century. Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.

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Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy. Where Timon of Athens meets Shania Twain, that's where you'll find Sitcom. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – offering, along the way, a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. In between, you'll find Auden, Arthur Carlson, oper, Girls Gone Wild and the lead from Suddenly Susan's turn as a creative writing student. Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom’s strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week’s episode.

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