Books published by Coach House Books

A lively contemporary translation of these action-packed medieval Icelandic poems.

One of the World's Favorite Foods: Many culinary cultures from around the world have a version of dumplings.Cook What You Read: Readers can try cooking the dumplings featured in the book with easy-to-follow recipes.A Diverse Collection of Food Writing: For fans of food writers with an interest in history, like Michael W. Twitty, Samin Nosrat, and Tamar Adler.

Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light showIn Surface Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning, letters and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs and logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater. Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us, the pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right, we are soaking in it!Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque collages.Not words, letters; not letters, shapes; not shapes, figures; not figures, ciphers; not ciphers, ornaments; not ornaments, decoration; not decoration, semiotics; not semiotics, communicative possibilities; not vagrant potential, slowly forming inflection; not melting deflection, language as dance: in, out, upside down, flapping, flipping, all ways round. Charles Bernstein, recipient 2019 Bollingen Prize for American PoetryThe striking compositions youll find inSurface Tensionare being presented sequentially in book form, yet that they wouldnt be out of place hanging on the wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves Gomringer when writing that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works merit sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter on the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their 'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and, here, 'that is poetry as I need it,' to quote Cage. Think of them as anti- advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful manifestations of the irreducible plasticity of numbers, punctuation marks, and letter forms. No logos. Mnica de la Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature, Brooklyn College; co-editor ofWomen in Concrete Poetry 19591979With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging the twentieth-century tech- nology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry into the twenty-first century. WithSurface Tension, Beaulieu takes the possibilities of that new idiom even further, unsettling the fixity his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging the set in Letraset as poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves, sag as if under their own weight, pool and smear in the liquid logic of heated ink, or swoop and blur as if in motion. In the process, these poems make visible the filmic potential of the photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers from brittling stock, and the three-dimensional substrate of the page with its flexible bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part about their own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a self-aware and intelligent process. Craig Dworkin, author ofRadium of the Word: A Poetics of MaterialityWhen most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to poetically intervene within these spaces that are not traditionally poetic? The answer to Derek Beaulieus question, put forward in his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten bril- liantly adventurous visual poems in hisSurface Tensionmake a startling case for his fascinating Letraset /photocopier inventions. Beaulieus compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical narrative; soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he calls 'a poetry of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp would have called it the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple Symmetry' or 'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their minutely evolving new spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting book a book producing new pleasures with each turn of the page. Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University

Chinese-Mauritian Diaspora Poetry: Asian American representation in poetry spans a wide range of generations, regions, and cultures but only recently has begun to take a place on the mainstage with award-winning poets such as Ocean Vuong and Yi Sang.A New Talent in Poetry: Pulses was selected by Griffin Poetry Prize winner Liz Howard for the prestigious Writers' Trust of Canada Mentorship program. Howard wrote, "In reading Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin's poetry, I became immersed within a deep sense memory of why I came to love poetry in the first place."

LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATUREIs love real if the beloved isnt? Girl, Interrupted meets Rebecca in this taut tale of love and madnessWhen Tia meets Pacifique, its a once-in-a-lifetime love. They spend five wild days and nights together, and then Tia wakes up in an ambulancewith a collarbone broken in a bike accident and no trace of Pacifique. Unable to convince anyone that Pacifique exists, Tia winds up in a psychiatric ward, forced to face the possibility that this perfect lover may be a figment of her imagination. While there, Tia meets Andrew, a contemplative man with schizophrenia, who falls in love with Tia. He, too, tells her to forget Pacifique. Who to believe? The medical establishment and her fellow patients? Or her frail human memory? And if Pacifique truly is a figment, is life in the real world with Andrew enough?In concise and vibrant prose, Sarah L. Taggart illuminates the dark corners of delusion (or is it delusion?) and a mental-health system that consigns people to endless limbo. Lucid and destabilizing, graceful and raw, this novel asks: is losing ones sanity so different from falling in love? Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love StoriesPacifique turns the psychological thriller on its head, allowing madness to be a meaningful lens through which to see the world instead of a cheap plot twist. Taggart has created a stunning, smart and revolutionary novel here - one that forces its readers to see clearly what so often remains hidden. This book means so much to me. One of the best I've read in years. Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out On The Ground

Night Became Years is poetry in the sauntering tradition of the flaneur. Stefanik loafers his way over sacred geography and explores his own mixed heritage through the lexicon of Elizabethan canting language. Comparing the terminology of fifteenth--century English beggar vernacular with a contemporary Canadian inner--city worldview, the poems in Night Became Years unfold as separate entities while at the same time forming a larger narrative on the possibilities of poetry today and the nature of mixed--blood identity.

The story of how Toronto became a music mecca. From Yonge Street to Yorkville to Queen West to College, the neighbourhoods that housed Toronto's music scenes. Featuring Syrinx, Rough Trade, Martha and the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Rheostatics, Ghetto Concept, LAL, Broken Social Scene, and more! 'Jonny Dovercourt, a tireless force in Toronto's music scene, offers the widest-ranging view out there on how an Anglo-Saxon backwater terrified of people going to bars on Sundays transforms itself into a multicultural metropolis that raises up more than its share of beloved artists, from indie to hip-hop to the unclassifiable. His unique approach is to zoom in on the rooms where it's happened - the live venues that come and too frequently go - as well as on the people who've devoted their lives and labours to collective creativity in a city that sometimes seems like it'd rather stick to banking. For locals, fans, and urban arts denizens anywhere, the essential Any Night of the Week is full of inspiration, discoveries, and cautionary tales.' - Carl Wilson, Slate music critic and author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of Billboard's '100 Greatest Music Books of All Time' 'Toronto has long been one of North America's great music cities, but hasn't got the same credit as L.A., Memphis, Nashville, and others. This book will go a long way towards proving Toronto's place in the music universe.' - Alan Cross, host, the Ongoing History of New Music 'The sweaty, thunderous exhilaration of being in a packed club, in collective thrall to a killer band, extends across generations, platforms, and genre preferences. With this essential book, Jonny has created something that's not just a time capsule, but a time machine.' - Sarah Liss, author of Army of Lovers

In Greater America, with sleep under siege, this lucid and prophetic novel of ideas depicts the end of human reverie.An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusion – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own.In slippery, exhilarating, and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream."S. D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid is a brilliant, visionary satire on the digital mindscape of twenty-first-century late capitalism embodied in the new global state of Greater America. Insomnia is in; dreams are seditious; sleep is outlawed. Lulled by false fantasies projected by Artificial Intelligence (CI in the book), video games, and media collaborators, humans drug themselves to stay awake so they can slave through the now standard twenty-hour work days. Witty, oracular, Surreal, trenchant, politically astute, and often hilarious, The Eyelid is a throwback to the classics of the genre, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Butler's Erewhon. We are turning into a race of sleep-deprived automatons, Chrostowska warns, increasingly unable to mount political opposition or even dream a different future." —Douglas Glover

Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents' friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.Complete with Alfred's drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the "e;hour of the wolf,"e; that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can't tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?

A buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that wont quitImagine youre standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door wont stop knocking ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkners world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it means to overcome a condition when living is a part of the condition itself, these poems observe the speakers world as it crowds around him, coming into sharper and specific focus, from the hard wisdom of saints on suffering and a slightly unhinged Caravaggio on the metaphysics of painting, through to the deep meaning of a hot dog and a thoroughly botched retelling of a Norm Macdonald joke. Throughout it all, Advil whirls around like an unruly tornado of a sidekick, snapping Polaroids and searching for a cloud that resembles a plausible end-of-life scenario.Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows. But dont worry. Advils on the case and aims to find out.These wry poems cajole the reader into feverish attentiveness. Andrew Faulkner'sHeady Bloomis that unusual collection of poems whose aim is generous and profound, but whose means are often comic and provocative, all jagged edges and elbows. Chaplinesque, perhaps, but Chaplin at an all-ages hardcore show, or having been to one and reflecting on it later, in tranquility. Ed Skoog, author ofTravelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red LightsAmong other issues, this book explores how the seizures, hallucinations, and excruciating pain caused by neurological conditions that are now treated clinically were once thought of as visions granted to and endured by saints. Faulkner does this in poems that are filled with seriousness but also humor, unlikely allusions, and exhilarating wordplay. A running conceit is the speakers ambivalent relationshipa kind of bromancewith Advil, modern medicine personified as his nemesis and doppelgnger, a taunting comedian but also a vital helpmate, a debased version of the saints archangelic protectors. Faulkners imagery and conceits surprise and delight. A strange and beautiful book. Geoffrey Nutter

For fans of the creative translations of Mary Jo Bang and Kathy AckerFor readers of classic literature who enjoy playful, loose retellings of classic books in the tradition of Jack Spicer's After Lorca and James Joyce's UlyssesThis version of Beowulf fits in well with the trend of modern, feminist translations such as Emily Wilson's The Odyssey and Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf: A New Feminist Translation of the Epic PoemMarkotic offers a contemporary take on Beowulf's language and, more unusually, the culture and character of the hero of this foundational text.Classic poetry continues to find new readers with the help of modernized translations, such as Mary Jo Bang's recent translations of Dante's Divine Comedy. Blurbs forthcoming

An Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in peoples lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.Whitemud Walkingis so smart and so ceaselessly innovative. It represents for me a fully assured instantiation of the Indigenous literary project: a confrontation of history's terrors head on and an articulation in the present of our beauty and indomitability. Weigel refuses the archive's efforts to flatten Indigenous subjectivity and, in so doing, opens up a kind of boundless space to remember and grieve but also to hope and imagine otherwise. A deeply felt accomplishment. Billy-Ray Belcourt, author ofA History of My Brief BodyWhitemud Walkingis a testament to the power of grief and outrage that so much theft has been allowed to bulldoze Indigenous land rights. Matthew James Weigel's passion for research both honours and mourns what has been trampled and lied about. This is a devastating read but one to learn from. Mahsi cho, Matthew. Your grief is our call to action to learn our own histories and build upon our own Indigenous testimonies of what really happened and when and who was there to witness it. Mahsi cho. Richard Van Camp, Tlicho Dene author ofThe Lesser BlessedandMoccasin Square GardensWhitemud Walkingis a textual ecology, that through archival troubling, sampling, and reframing, allows the material, human, truly cellular historicity of treaty to enter as a living presence in our contemporary moment. Weigel writes, 'Here treaty means reciprocity and obligation. Here, treaty lasts forever'. This book is not the document you may hold in your hands but the shift in consciousness it foments within you. It is a gift. Liz Howard, author ofInfinite Citizen of the Shaking TentEchoing the caw and grackle of magpies, Matthew James WeigelsWhitemud Walkinglives the sound of Treaty 6. Voices whisper sanctuary in creekbeds, papers rustle precedence in archives; theres a buzz in your ear, a catch in your throat listen. Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate

The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of “indie gamesâ€? ‿ with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world. Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Far Shore, has been released for Sony PlayStation and Epic Games Store. In the decade from inception to launch, Adams brought author Adam Hammond along for the ride, allowing unprecedented insight into the complicated genesis of Jett. The Far Shore offers a portrait of the enigmatic Adams and his team, the genius and artistry, the successes and setbacks, that went into building the world of JETT, in which you‿re tasked with scouting a new home for a humanoid people after they‿ve decimated their planet. To provide context, Hammond recounts the history of indie games and how their trajectory has followed that of independent art and literature. A riveting insider‿s look at one of our most popular art forms.

Kicking ass and taking notes—what it's like to be a woman in the ring.Alison Dean teaches English literature. She also punches people. Hard. But despite several amateur fights under her belt, she knows she will never be taken as seriously as a male boxer. ';You punch like a girl' still isn't a compliment — women aren't supposed to choose to participate in violence.Her unique perspective as a 30-something university lecturer turned amateur fighter allows Dean to articulately and with great insight delve into the ways martial arts can change a person's — and particularly a woman's — relationship to their body and to the world around them, and at the same time considers the ways in which women might change martial arts.Combining historical research, anecdotal experience, and interviews with coaches and fighters, Seconds Out explores our culture's relationship with violence, and particularly with violence practiced by women."e;An important addition to women's martial arts scholarship, Dean provides personal insight into the radical space women occupy in sport fighting. Seconds Out is a must-read for all fighters looking for mentors in the complicated world of martial arts."e; —L.A. Jennings, author of Mixed Martial Arts: A History from Ancient Fighting Sports to the UFC"e;Dean brings a fresh new female voice to the topic of combat sports."e; —Trevor Wittman, renowned MMA trainer, UFC analyst, and founder of ONX Sports"e;Trained in the discipline and art of both fighting and literature, Dean combines both with style. She honors the fighters, writers, and historians who have come before her and definitively ends the idea of women fighters as a novelty. Seconds Out is a must-read for anyone who feels the call of the bell and reverence for a good fight."e; —Sue Jaye Johnson