THREE DEATHS by Josip Novakovich
Three Deaths is acclaimed writer Josip Novakovich’s first exclusively Canadian edition of his writing. This elegant edition works as a triptych consisting of three distinct genres: a personal essay, a short story, and a classic tale. All three exquisite texts concern the primary theme of death and are rendered with Novakovich’s renowned and uncanny sense of syntax and narrative. Three Deaths is at once dark and poignant, fierce and tender, and is both the perfect introduction to the works of Novakovich and the ideal collector’s edition for longtime fans.
Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at Bard, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State, and now, Concordia University in Montreal.
POETS AND KILLERS by Helen Hajnoczky
Advertising speaks to its audience directly, addressing “you.” But who is this person, this “you” that advertising addresses? Poets and Killers answers this question by telling the life story of a man through advertising. Beginning in the 1940s when he is born, working up to 2010 when he dies, Poets and Killers uses lines taken directly from advertisements to write the main character’s biography. This book examines what it means to be an individual in a world where we are all sold the same individuality, exploring what possibilities for a non-utilitarian humanity still exist between the lines of advertising copy. By using the language of advertising to create something fundamentally unmarketable and useless, that is, the story of a fallible human life expressed through experimental poetry, Poets and Killers shows that despite the pervasiveness of advertising and its efforts to rob us of the ability to express ourselves without commodifying ourselves, we can still speak.
Helen Hajnoczky holds a BA Honours in English and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary, where her research focused on contemporary feminist avant-garde poetics. Her work has appeared in fillingStation, Matrix, NoD, Rampike, and Speechless magazines, as well as in a variety of chapbooks. She has served as assistant editor of NoD magazine, as poetry editor of fillingStation magazine, and has been a weekly contributor to the literary blog Lemon Hound.
THE LATERAL by Jake Kennedy
Winner of the 2010 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry! The Lateral is a highly original and experimental book from a nimble poetic mind. It includes an elegiac found-long-poem that gathers all the “Acker” keyword tags from the Flickr database and reapplies them as words-of-lament for the revolutionary artist-writer Kathy Acker (1947-97), a series of prose-poem-ruminations that contemplate the optimal conditions for the poetry, and a section of poemsthat can only be described as the vulgar, unkempt cousin of Hugh Prather’s Notes to Myself.
Jake Kennedy is a poet, prose writer, and teacher. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies. His chapbook, Hazard, is published by BookThug. Jake currently teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College.
UPDATE by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler
Update Terms of Service: This book will publish unauthorized communications. It will collect content or information using an automated means, employing harvesting bots, robots, spiders and/or scrapers without permission. It will engage in multi-level marketing. It may contain viruses or other malicious code. It may bully, intimidate and harass. It will contain content that is hateful, threatening and pornographic. It may contain nudity or graphic and gratuitous violence. It will have no age-based restrictions. It will be unlawful and misleading, and could disable, overburden or impair the proper workings of literature. It will facilitate and encourage the violation of poetry. It will let the dead speak.
Bill Kennedy is the Artistic Director of the Scream Literary Festival in Toronto and runs Stop14 Media, a new media consultancy. This is his second book with Darren Wershler and other literary robots.
HARD FEELINGS by Sheryda Warrener
Hard Feelings holds the instant up, halts it mid-air, exposes an astounding world: fake cicada cries blare from loudspeakers; a rack of meat hangs from a bicycle basket; Nixon sidles off with the cake; diving horses of Atlantic City plunge. The neon rope of loneliness tightens. Like holding a glass up to the light to find it muddy with marks, Hard Feelings reveals, as Francine Prose writes, “little climaxes of disquiet.” Here, our strange, genuine and unexpected human impulses are revealed. These poems offer a hopefulness and a gratitude for our ordinary, everyday lives.
Sheryda Warrener’s poems have appeared in Canadian journals such as The Malahat Review, EVENT, Antigonish Review, Grain, and The Fiddlehead, and in the anthology Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets (Nightwood, 2004). She received a BFA from the University of Victoria in 2001, and an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2008.
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