A radically liberating collection of essays, ideas and approaches to writing and teaching poetry

Do It Wrong is a short, snappy series of provocations and suggestions designed to help poets think outside the box and foster creativity.

It’s a permission slip to take a path others reject, to do the counter-intuitive thing, to embrace the weird.

It's a guidebook designed to bring poets together, to question our assumptions, and to move past the “business as usual” educational models into the new, the strange, and the “wrong.”

And it's a playful, purposeful contribution toward the building of stronger, more resilient writing communities.

For readers of Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What and Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, Derek Beaulieu distills 20 years of experience teaching creative writing into a joyfully mischievous manifesto on how to write and teach poetry with meaning.

A debut collection of interconnected fiction that delivers a frothy, philosophical take on modern female archetypes.

In elementary school math, she was given a worksheet with six connected squares in the shape of a T, so she drew one girl in each box. When Jeanne was told to cut around the shape, and fold and tape the squares into one cube, she couldn’t decide whether to keep the girls outside, looking away from each other, or trapped inside, looking in. Her solution was to rip it up and eat the pieces. The six characters have lived inside her ever since.

An unnamed woman retreats to sort herself into the various roles she has played (Sister, Friend, Server, Lover); another woman, Jeanne, checks into a hotel-turned-escape room emptyhanded. These parallel narratives lead a parade of interconnected stories and a novella featuring women of all ages who feel divided between their various roles and their past and present selves. With warmth and humour, the stories in Mom Camp reposition selfhood as rooted in relationship and explore the phenomenology of consciousness—and what it means to be the narrator of your own life.

Poems that retrace unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the tar sands

Goose is a collection of hand-traced visual poems made using found text and images from the 1938 and 1956 editions of Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region authored by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells (1878–1971). Goose takes Ells’s early work surveying, mining, and separating bituminous sand, along with his colonial, racist, and sexist attitudes and aesthetics, as the starting point for an inventive and biting critique of the oil-sands industry and our petromodern energy system.

At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Goose inverts found-poetry erasure and procedural techniques to explore themes of extraction and the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the land to enact irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism.

An evocative, lyric bricolage of memoir, literature, history, and translation that wrestles with the shape death takes.

Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.

In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria, Australia. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw her loved ones again. Netherclift hasn’t stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.

What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, building toward the realization that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.

"Beautiful, and terribly moving. She approaches unbearable loss with a delicate step, and walks right to its core, paying it the deepest possible respect."—Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief and Monkey Grip

A gorgeous, Gothic, Romany coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 1980s Southern Ontario tobacco belt—with a dash of magic realism.

Longing for glamour and riches and freedom, Zelda is a young woman who chafes against her Romany identity and her family's poverty. Everything changes when she’s lured away from working alongside her mother and aunts and other migrant workers in the tobacco fields and is hired as an assistant and good luck charm to the charismatic Trixie Tormentine.

What starts out as a summer of ease and access to the unfettered wealth of the Tormentines—Trixie's husband Jack owns the tobacco farm that employs Zelda's family and friends—unspools into dangerous displays of power and manipulation. One of the Romany family's puppets, grandmother Puri Dai, acts as Zelda's confidante and mentor, and warns her about the devil of the tobacco fields, a harbinger of destruction.

As Zelda struggles with her simmering feelings toward the Tormentines, the devil appears to her one night in a motel parking lot. Can Puri Dai's love pull Zelda back from the brink and into a new future? The fate of her family depends on it.