Thumbscrews
Natalie Zina Walschots
10.00 Canadian / USA
4.75 X 7 inches
ISBN 978-0-9739438-6-3 / 0-9739438-6-6
The 2007 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry Winner!

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or McNally Robinson

Thumbscrews is a poetic engagement with the aesthetics of sadomasochism and consensual pain. It employs the techniques of mannerist poetry to constrain language as ropes, cuffs, or shackles that might be used to constrain the body. Each poem can be taken as a miniature sadomasochistic encounter where language is tied up, beaten, and twisted into submission. This book abuses language; language begs for it.

Thumbscrews engages with the sexual subculture of BDSM in content as well as in form. It explores the erotic ’scene’ and the prevalence of role-playing in the kinky bedroom, examines various settings as ‘pervertable’ locations, and chronicles a series of embarrassing trips to the emergency room. Poems are shaped from the hobbled language of email, visual representations of pain, and odes to various implements. Thumbscrews is a dirty-minded, sticky-fingered book.

About the author:

Natalie Zina Walschots recently completed her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. She serves as the Managing Editor for filling Station and is the co-organizer of the Flywheel reading series. She has also served as the Managing Editor for dANDelion. Her work has recently appeared in Matrix and The Capilano Review. Sections of Thumbscrews have appeared as the No Press chapbooks Passion Play and Christening.

FAKE MATH
ryan fitzpatrick

10.00 Canadian / USA
4.75 X 7 inches
ISBN: 978-0-9739438-5-6 / 0-9739438-5-8

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“Moments are the elements of profit.” - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1

Composed primarily through the co-optation and recombination of internet search results, FAKE MATH is a poetic intervention into the ways the motive for profit structures our lives. Each poem exposes the fallacies, fake logics, and sheer idiocies that constrict our decision-making processes in terms of our art, industry, educational system, and our day-to-day lives, while questioning our tendency to resort to institutionalized social violence. FAKE MATH draws its inspiration from diverse sources from Marx to Freud, from Archimedes to Oprah, sending them all downstream on rapidly pulsating waves of schizophrenic glee and political gravity, often creating startling juxtapositions when mismatched ideas and images are torn from their original contexts. The effects are at once humorous and stomach-churning. Ultimately, these are poems about how we live, work, and play within larger structures of capitalism and how our attempts to move past these structures are largely failed attempts at rebellion, not real attempts at revolution or, better yet, escape.

About the author:

Born and raised in Calgary, ryan fitzpatrick is a founding editor of (orange) magazine and a past editor and board member of filling Station magazine. His poetry has been published across Canada, most notably the anthologies Post-Prairie (2005, Talonbooks, Eds. Robert Kroetsch and Jon Paul Fiorentino) and Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (2005, Mercury Press, Eds. derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, and a. rawlings). FAKE MATH is his first full-length collection of poems.

the small blue
Jay MillAr
ISBN 978-0-9739438-4-9 / 0-9739438-4-X
10.00 CDN / USA
4.75 X 7 inches

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What is the small blue? It is a condition. It is a fragmented mood disorder. It includes impressions, forgotten bits, broken lyricism, biographical sketches. All of which culminates into the small blue – a feeling, or perhaps the distant translation of a feeling; the literal translation of an obscure line from Apollinaire: le petit bleu. A lyric state, a meditation that moves backward, an exercise in psychic time. What is the small blue? It is a book of fragments.

About the author:

Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of False Maps for Other Creatures, Mycological Studies and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr. Most recently he published Double Helix, a collaborative novel written with Stephen Cain. He is the figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to cutting edge work by well-known and emerging North American writers, as well as Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. He currently teaches creative writing at George Brown College.

BREAKING NEWS!

Snare Books is thrilled to announce that Natalie Zina Walschots is the winner of the 1st annual Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her manuscript, Thumbscrews, will be published in the fall of 2007 by Snare Books.

Thumbscrews is a poetic engagement with the aesthetics of sadomasochism and consensual pain. It employs the techniques of mannerist poetry to constrain language as ropes, cuffs, or shackles that might be used to constrain the body. Each poem can be taken as a miniature sadomasochistic encounter where language is tied up, beaten, and twisted into submission. This book abuses language; language begs for it.

Thumbscrews engages with the sexual subculture of BDSM in content as well as in form. It explores the erotic ’scene’ and the prevalence of role-playing in the kinky bedroom, examines various settings as ‘pervertable’ locations, and chronicles a series of embarrassing trips to the emergency room. Poems are shaped from the hobbled language of email, visual representations of pain, and odes to various implements. Thumbscrews is a dirty-minded, sticky-fingered book.

About Snare:
Snare Books is a Montreal-based literary publisher dedicated to innovative writing. Take the time to visit our titles and authors pages and don’t forget to check out the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

Snare Books
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Montreal QC
H2W 1V5

2006 BOOKS

THE EMILY VALENTINE POEMS
poetry by Zoe Whittall
6X6 inches
$10.00 CDN / US
ISBN: 0-9739438-3-1 / 978-0-9739438-3-2
The Emily Valentine Poems, Zoe Whittall’s second collection of poetry, is an innovative book that challenges the impossible notions of femininity that permeate our culture. The texts within include self-portraits, prose poems, fake fan letters and confessional lyric snapshots. These are pharmaceutically enhanced tributes to the hangovers of twenty-something love and to the pop icons from an unconventional 1980s childhood. With The Emily Valentine Poems, Zoe Whittall provides us with the perfect soundtrack for the culturally literate rebel in all of us.

“The only book of poetry I enjoyed this year was Zoe Whittall’s The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. Everything about this book is pleasing.”
— Geist

“Brave, fun inventive poetry…favoring the emotional and the sensual, these delicate reflections and reinventions create a space where desire and distance combine.”
— Broken Pencil

Zoe Whittall was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and is now based in Toronto. She is the author of Bottle Rocket Hearts (Cormorant, 2007), The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan, 2001) and editor of Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws (McGilligan, 2003). She regularly writes cultural criticism for a variety of Canadian magazines.

ROPEWALK
poetry by Angela Carr
6X6 inches
$10.00 CDN / US ISBN 0-9739438-2-3 / 978-0-9739438-2-5
Ropewalk makes an acrobatic journey through the structures of history and language. Reminiscent of the work of Adrienne Rich and Gertrude Stein, Carr’s poems are compelling and challenging. At the core of the book lies a suite of poems that artfully revises the biography of sixteenth-century poet Louise Labé. Carr’s subtle skills bring language, ideas, memory and silences into a brilliant and highly original constellation.
“These poems are fascinating, difficult as stories constructed ‘under customs of cut and paste’ require a different kind of seeing. They meditate on history, dream, and autobiography as woven together, threads in the ropewalk, over which we traverse the abyss of the past, propelled by desire, memory and imagination.”
Mary di Michele
Angela Carr lives in Montreal where she is a contributing editor for Matrix magazine. Ropewalk is her first book.

CANADA POST
Jason Christie
$10.00 CDN / US
6×6 inches
96 pages
Poetry
ISBN 0-9739438-0-7 / 978-0-9739438-0-1

Jason Christie’s Canada Post interrogates the linguistic imperatives of the communication age and investigates the links between language and nationality with dry, delirious wit. Christie’s poems evidence a frightening, ludic journey from the capital to the outlying punctuation where the familiarity of our nation, language and identity begin to disappear in the cracks and fades of discourse. “Beware of grammar,” these poems advise. “It’ll get you every time.” Shrewdly political, wickedly funny, and fiercely intelligent, Canada Post is an important debut collection.

“Wry poetic trickster Jason Christie points a sharpened stick at Canadian politics, institutions, media and grammar.”

—Broken Pencil

Jason Christie is an editor for filling Station. He lives in Calgary.

DREADFUL PARIS
Melissa A. Thompson
$10.00 CDN / US
6×6 inches
88 Pages
ISBN 0-9739438-1-5 / 978-0-9739438-1-8

I am the dull sister, the matte finish in a family of fine, sparkling things.
Having written this down on the second-to-last page of a borrowed copy of Art in America, at the age of 26, in the Turkish Delight Specialty Café, Ramona De Lottenville conspires to find her own glittering corner of the world. Further down that same page, Southebys announces the upcoming auction of a collection of rare thaumatropic devices. Cherished by Cheltenham Ladies College since 1887 and now available for public auction, a glorious possibility presents itself to Ramona. Dreadful Paris is a tale of private Mona Lisas, photographic decadence and, above all, distractions of the exquisite sort.

Melissa A. Thompson lives in Montreal, where she works as a researcher. Dreadful Paris is her first book.