Books published by Coach House Books

Explores the language of certain influential aspects of early to mid-twentieth-century popular culture. This title presents a playful book of poetry with a serious trigger finger.

Tells a tale of love that features a lonely Indian elephant, newly arrived at the Calgary Zoo from Holland, with a penchant for moonlight escapes, and the wooden Maytag Man statue on Calgary's 9th Street, with his sad eyes, his oaken thighs, his aloofness.

Louise Bak's second book, "Tulpa" (in Buddhist mysticism, a magical entity created by intensely concentrated thought), continues her challenging exploration of a broad range of themes and uses of the global lexicon. Combining a visual artist's flair for colour with a performance artist's transgressive interventions, Bak is a unique voice in post-colonial Canadian writing.

"Busted" is a book about governance, and a catalogue of possible relations. It explores a litany of genres concerned with allegiance and refusal, and inhabits the array of ways we do or don't jive with self, group and governing relations. It is a polemic, it is a collage that interrogates how language and linguistic discourses contribute to shaping the relationship between the subject and polity.

Steve Venright, the true heir to the literary legacy of Henri Michau, Christopher Dewdney and Jorge Luis Borges, is the only surrealist ever to come from Sarnia, Ontario. Spiral Agitator, his fourth book, is a sumptuous assortment of prose poems and visual art from beyond the Turbulated Curtain.

Yet another book of poems from the ubiquitous poet, playwright, actor, director, visual artist and standardized patient (yes, standardized patient), Stan Rogal. This is the first of Rogal's books to feature samples of his collage work.

Natalee Caple made quite a splash with her first two books, "The Heart is its Own Reason," a short-story collection from Insomniac Press, and "The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World," a novel from House of Anansi Press.With "A More Tender Ocean" Caple turns her hand to poetry, and the results are no less dazzling. The poems were written using a Surrealist technique called automatic writing - a kind of poetic impressionism after speed-reading. The effect is a kind of dreamlike state - everything isn't quite as it should be, as though it had all been seen through the facet of a diamond. The poems are lyrical, erotic, gentle, happy, sad and strangely beautiful."A More Tender Ocean" is unusual but immensely moving and compelling, tender but not maudlin. 'What goes on seems ordinary, ' writes Caple. Rest assured, it is not.

Alexandra Leggat, the author of Moondogging and numerous book and music reviews, puts on the page the remarkable texts that she is renowned for performing at spoken word events all over Toronto.

A double-lunged bong hit of mid-Eighties post-punk college rock, Gertrude Stein, art films, and the comedic legacy of Laurel and Hardy (including such great standup teams as HD and Ezra Pound, Jesus and Judas, and Steve McCaffery and bpNichol). Jeff Derksen says: 'If reading is sixty-nining, then "dyslexicon" satisfies at both ends. Stephen Cain disentangles everyday life into its constituent emotional, intellectual, sexual and cultural parts - people, the city, books, music - only to recombine them into a new set of relations ... It's a sexy m-f of a book. Put it on your turntables.'

At long last, this double-barrelled collection of visual poetry, "sensory deprivation" and "dream poetics," by damian lopes is now in print. Considered visual essays by the author, "sensory deprivation" explores the visual noise and overload of contemporary culture, while "dream poetics" offers an argument for a poetics in this culture. The print book is the companion to the online edition.

A beautiful conjunction of the late Douglas Clark's minimalist poetry and photography, this book transforms the mundane detritus of our collective past into a series of contemporary illuminations. Articles of Faith are found, given, fought for, hoarded and cherished ...They are the marks we leave in passing.' -- Douglas Clark

'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poets instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poets quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech. Frank Davey

The triumphant return of the 1975 cult classic and seminal graphic novel - it's a nightmare you can't awake from.