Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn’t exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest.

Lyle Neff’s Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism.

Black Rabbit & Other Stories is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility.

Body Breakdowns is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment. Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major.

Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.

From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly. Budge is a novel about addiction, rehabilitation, and finding the meaning of life.

Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture’s vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of death.

Sun Belt’s collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town.