To call Poetry is Queer a book of essays, as its copyright page does, would be like calling the Sistine Chapel ceiling a serviceable paint job.
It’s a wide-ranging, unclassifiable dance through the glorious mind of an uninhibited icon of the Toronto literary scene, variously including, among many other things, frank memoir, sage advice, local queer history, snippets of the writings that shaped the author’s development, and a general celebration of life truly well-lived.
Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers?real and imagined?conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word ?queer? for those who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank OHara, to mowing Walt Whitmans grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.
The Boulevardis a weird historical fiction in a supernatural frame. What’s not to like?
Satan has presumptuously had Vincent Van Gogh brighten up the main street of his gloomy, corporeal Hell. God would definitely not approve.
So when God decides to pay the dark realm an unprecedented visit, Satan sadly realizes he’ll have to tear it all down. On a train ride to break the news to the reclusive artist, he regales drinking companion Ernest Hemingway with the history of how the project came about, including a well-researched and wonderfully shaped walk-through of Western art history.
Known for his Saint John-based novels, Jerrod Edson enters the world of speculative literature with The Boulevard, an ambitious novel featuring Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Satan, and a train ride through Hell.
For the first time since Satan's banishment, God plans a visit to the lower world, and Satan is in a bind. In defiance, he has built Hell in the image of Heaven, but now he must destroy its beauty or face God's wrath. Singed with dark humour, packed with historical detail and written in Edson's straightforward style, with themes that include the search for happiness and the…
The arrival on her doorstep of an impossible book sends horror screenwriter River Black in search of answers to the Japan she’d fled two decades earlier.
The story of that trip—and of the life she’d lived there before—is compelling, with convincing, beautifully drawn characters and precise, spellbindingly intricate settings. This is a very engaging and wonderfully crafted tale.
River Black found cult success writing slasher flicks but has grown increasingly disillusioned and unhappy. When a mysterious book appears in her mailbox, her life is turned upside down. River returns to Nagano, Japan, where the book originated, hoping to pay respects to old friends and revisit her past. Instead, she finds her memory is duplicitous, her reality is porous, and the mysterious book is more alive than she could have believed. River, Diverted is a dark fairy tale that explores the trickery of memory, the delicacy of friendship, the…
When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He’s been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime. As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Western history. Call Me Stan is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love. Or almost everyone.
