Some Recent Arrivals from BOOK THUG

BookThug, based in Toronto and published by poet Jay MillAr, "seeks to publish innovative books of poetry, prose and creative criticism that extend the tradition of experimental literature."


Nature
Mark Truscott
$15.00

Nature is us and we are nature. Nature is out to kill us. Nature is heterosexual. Nature is gay. Nature is masculine. Nature is a woman. Nature is natural. Nature is culture. Nature is the nature of reality. Nature is a metaphor. Nature is like money. Nature is calling. Language is our nature. Few ideas today are as charged or subject to as many contradictory inflections as is nature.

To anchor its compositional investigations into its own material, Mark Truscott’s Nature considers the difficulties of this overdetermined concept and asks – without recourse to nostalgia, sanctimony, or moralism – what kind of space it might meaningfully create or occupy.


Horizontal Surfaces
George Bowering
$18.00

Every once in a while Bowering has to turn to a book such as this. Horizontal Surfaces came from the same atelier as Craft Slices and Errata. You could keep the book somewhere that you visit for short periods, reading one item at a time. You should also feel free to add a sentence or two.

George Bowering writes these books about literary composition as well as short stories and the odd novel. He is also a poet of sorts, and won some prizes for his poetry a long time ago. He is currently working on another book about baseball, having found another niche that will never be seen by his country’s literary types.
Cop Kisser
Steve Zultanski
$22.50

Cop Kisser is a book of 18 poems in a variety of modes. Some are quasiconceptual, some repetitively relational, and some are hyperactive lyric collage. These modes have been ordered intuitively into what appears as a totalizing structure. Thus, it’s a big book, and deceptively so. Really there are only about two ideas in here. See if you can find them all! But be careful: don’t let Cop Kisser fool you. It doesn’t want to know what it’s about, and wasn’t written for the betterment of the reader. In fact, it was barely written. It’s just one of those things that showed up one day and refused to leave – like love, enemies, or authorship.

"Like a breath of fresh air, Cop Kisser forces itself into the mouth, for taste, into the lungs, for expansion, and into a thin paper bag, for huffing that one that is the many that are repetitions of the nauseatingly delicious one." – Vanessa Place