Books published by Coach House Books

New Theatre represents a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that investigate the process of meaning. Coolly cerebral poems about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's later life muse on power and identity, while an intimate autobiographical long poem counterpoints several quieter, equally surprising pieces that spike and bloom. Autumn.The sky streaked with silk parachutesor by tears.A sparkling epidemic. I think if the world truly tore in half it would seep blue. Susan Steudel is the recipient of several awards for her poetry, including a Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for emerging artist. New Theatre is her first book.

"e;The empire's missing links are found deep in this poet's ever-astonishing states of multiple consciousnessastutely attuned to the pressured, violent, mass conformities forced upon usbrilliantly formed into poems as ambitious and achieved as any written in the English language today."e;Lawrence Joseph In these dramatic monologues, Walid Bitar delivers variations on the theme of power: in politics, in the subjugation and abuse of other cultures, and in our divided selves. Using satire, parody, koan, and riddle, Divide and Rule struggles with the mendacity of language and identity. They have no maps. Ours, I'll redraw.Isn't itself, their neck of the woods,needs a restsomething more than a nap,and less than death, though death wouldn't hurt. Walid Bitar's poetry collections include 2 Guys on Holy Land, Bastardi Puri, and The Empire's Missing Links. He was born in Beirut and lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.Jenny Sampirisi is the managing editor of BookThug and co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing. She is the author of the novel is/was.

"e;McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack."e;The Washington PostMelding the deeply personal and the culturally popular, Li'l Bastard is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar. Written in part as an homage to John Berryman and Robert Lowell, this sequence of sixteen-line poems"e;chubby sonnets"e;explores the poet's obsessions (food, aging, baseball, beer, and Barnaby Jones) and map his midlife crisis on a wild flight through Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas, and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li'l Bastard will cement David McGimpsey's status as a beloved original.David McGimpsey is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including Lardcake and Sitcom. He teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

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 Barwins 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 Barwins trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.

Pompoms, blackberries and Value Village: Take a stroll through the thoughts of one of Canada's most intriguing poets and thinkers.

In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned, and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer, and the erosion of personal rights fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal.

To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early 1960s, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, it sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.Shifting focus between the limits of the microscope and the limits of the telescope, Matthew Tierney gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe, one that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.

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.

Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currins new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark cunning wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new and more personal territory. In a style that regularly pushes lifes barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currins poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life.

Sequestered on a street in a dry Calgary suburb, our heroine, the House, finds herself embroiled in a stalled love affair with an elusive and alluring Oxfordshire riverbank. In a series of self-contained poems both prosy and lyrical, this work follows this curious and engaging affair, which mysteriously coincides with a slow and gradual flood.

Contemporary Canadian poetry got you down? This book of poems operates within the constraints of what the author terms 'synaptic syntax' - poetry that performs the very nature of neuronal activity from the point of view of a mood-enhanced Human Comedy, which, with a quick turn of phrase, or missing neurotransmitter, could become Human Tragedy.