Coach House Books

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards)

If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge that gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming.

She made hyphens and made me use them.
From her back she pulled brackets. Saying:
"These in your throat and these around your neck."

Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Ex Machina and Clockfire, which was shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award.

Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today's cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo, and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know "you" is you? Can you wake him to move his arm? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.

Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in The Best Canadian Poetry 2013, and he was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.

"Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with."—Lambda Literary Review

MxT, or "Memory x Time," is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over in their hands, by invoking other poets, by appropriating science, by studying the history of elegy. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

All the gods know is destinations. I have raised
A glass, my eye, your hook. Let's face it the world
Is a shrinking place and hungry: too much grief
To feed. I float away from you on hard

Covers. I step out on the stacked hours. Words
If they were soil how I would throw them back into the
Compost pile and wait for spring. Those "this is how
It is," speeches appear and later diamonds soft as bullets.

I went to the library looking to scaffold my thoughts.
Sure, now you say Lucretius. Intelligence is so often
Hindsight. Outside Holly Golightly's townhouse
There are taxis. The end of me, or you, is of no concern.

Frederick Seidel anoints me with the head of his penis.
It is soft as a chamois and spreads like egg across my scalp.

Sina Queyras is the author of the Lambda Award–winning Lemon Hound, Expressway (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award), and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award). She often writes for the Poetry Foundation and runs the online journal Lemon Hound (Lemonhound.com).