A Calendar of Airs     August Kleinzahler
Poetry     64 pp     5 1/4 x 8 3/4     0 88910 103 5 pb
    'Converting Apollo's lyre into something like a cross between a Jew's harp and a catapult, he whistles, or twangs, through isolated particulars of common speech, the presence of a universe, with real human times and spaces patterned into it.' - Christopher Middleton.
    'His poems are structures as cunningly built as kites and canoes. Their elements have been chosen rather than found. They make good human sense. They are astute, original, objective. And wonderfully good to read.' - Guy Davenport

Chestnut / Flower / Eye of Venus     Gerald Lampert
Fiction     167 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 079 9 pb
    It's an old axiom of psychoanalysis, one that Gerald Lampert knew, that the potential for people hating you is greatest when you're telling them unwanted truths. Chestnut / Flower / Eye of Venus is full of powerful insights and, obviously, many painful and unwanted truths.
    'A quiet, contemplative study of a marriage breaking up and a man terrorized by the thought of losing his grasp on life. The success of this novel lies in his ability to maintain consistency of tone. It's so realistic. It makes perfect sense, posing neither miraculous solutions nor a romanticised version of the marriage experience. The ending is superb.' - Windsor Star
    'The most impressive feature of Chestnut / Flower is the author's delight in a language which ranges from the offhand and colloquial to superb flights of unashamed rhetoric. The book is a product of an adult, literary and sophisticated mind.' - Canadian Forum
    'A finely balanced novel.' - London Free Press

Future Preconditional     Douglas Woolf
Fiction     96 pp     5 1/4 x 8 3/4     0 88910 058 6 pb
    Woolf says, 'I'm naturally devoted to the written word. It's the only thing man has that the other animals do not. Parrots can talk, flies can fly, monkeys can drop things, technicians can copy them all. If there were only one reader left in the world, I would write to that one as lovingly as I do now.'
    '"The Ice Cream Man," one of the best stories in the collection is a beautifully understated little horror piece on the triumph of evil over good in middle-class suburbia. "Rest Stop" and "The Contest" are good short pieces in a similar vein, commenting on human frailty from a detached perspective which makes the horror beneath the bland surface even more horrible ... Woolf's flippant sense of humour, his interest in word play and parody, his distrust of definition and that final sense of inconclusiveness ... here is Woolf speaking for himself.' - Diana Brydon, The Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English Reviews Journal

The Inks and The Pencils and The Looking Back     Sean O'Huigin
Poetry     72 pp     4 1/8 x 8     0 88910 083 7 pb
    O'Huigin helped found the Bohemian Embassy and the New Writers' Workshop and became involved in the first Artists in the Schools programs. He has led poetry workshops in Canada, the USA and Britain. He recently exhibited his visual works and performed his poetry at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This is his first major collection to be published in Canada and spans the period 1969 to 1977.

Journal     bpNichol
Fiction     88 pp     4 3/4 x 8 1/2     0 88910 120 5 pb
    In his third published novel, Nichol uses the obsessive repetitiveness of memory to trace a nameless character's struggles to overcome his own bitterness and despair.
    'Journal is a novel of repetition and inter-subjectivity, whose preoccupation with a certain limited group of events, objects and characters has the force of dream obsession. Simultaneity, coincidence, memory and hallucination play a significant part in the text, elucidating patterns of obfuscation and knowledge, as aspects of being are blocked from entering, or are leaked into consciousness.' - Brian Henderson, Canadian Forum
    'For all the abstraction of his prose, Nichol is always close to everyday human emotion; his narrative may not be realistic, but the events it deals with are recognizable. It is the openness of bpNichol's words, and hence the openness of his fears and longings, which draw us continually back to his work.' - Stephen Scobie, The Fiddlehead
    'Journal is a book about the necessity to put down books, to turn away from fiction back to life. It charts the pain of breaking out of the circle of solipsism to face the world of others ... It must be read in its entirety. And it is certainly worth the effort.' - Diana Brydon, CRNLE: Reviews Journal (Australia)
    Designed by Glenn Goluska and selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as one of the best-designed books of 1978.

Murder     David Halliday
Poetry     72 pp     5 3/4 x 8     0 88910 133 7 pb
    The archetypal crime of man slaying woman. Forty brutally understated poems here expose the angers, complicities, hysterias and violence that surround one act of murder and compel its investigators, judges, spectators and avengers. One comes from this book not only gripped by its artistry but also haunted by its large understanding of human conflict, of grief.
    Illustrated with twenty collages by the author.

Of Light     Robert Hogg
Poetry     72 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 081 0 hb
    '... his poems concentrate on world-intelligence, the words telling him what he knows or needs to know. The language becomes vividly that part of the poet's anatomy through which he thinks, feels, sees.... The quickest mind in the west.' - Warren Tallman, Boundary 2
    Of Light is the first new collection of Robert Hogg's poetry in seven years. His previous two collections are The Connexions (Oyez, Berkeley, 1966) and Standing Back (Coach House, 1971).

Paraverbal Figures     Ken Gist
Poetry     48 pp 5 1/2 x 7 1/2     0 88910 118 3 pb
    Assembling intuitive metaphors from the breakdown of the subjective view.
    'Although struck at the perimeter or forsaken in another country, your ideas go to touch out the Universal Mind to test the uncompromising gaze obliterating every trace of passage both up and down from archetypal realms of consciousness.'

The Pat Lowther Poem     Gail McKay
Poetry     72 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 105 1 pb
    In the fall of 1975 Gail McKay was a student in Pat Lowther's poetry workshop at the University of British Columbia. On one rainy September morning Pat Lowther failed to keep an appointment with Gail McKay. This missed appointment was only a minor aspect of Lowther's baffling disappearance that day, immediately before the annual meeting of the League of Canadian Poets of which she was president. In actual fact, Pat Lowther was dead, her body soon to be discovered in a creek-bed, and her husband soon to be charged with her murder.
    The Pat Lowther Poem is Gail McKay's personal confrontation with this murder - the murder of a friend, and teacher. The poem is direct, abrasive and unsentimental. In facing unflinchingly a fatal drama in which the writer herself is too much involved, The Pat Lowther Poem not only achieves a disturbing new poetic but greatly honours the woman whose death it mourns.

The Patty ReHearst Story     Deanne Taylor
Drama 59 pp     8 1/2 x 11     stapled
Series: CHP Manuscript Editions
    This play was written for five actors, a rock band and a closed-circuit video system. The final publication included stage directions, video effects, scoring and extensive photographic coverage. The MS edition is a first-draft transcript of the dialogue and songs. If you liked the libretto of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here Come the Sex Pistols, then you'll love this.
    Patty Rehearst - Written in 1976, produced at A Space, Café Soho, The New Yorker in Toronto 76/77; produced at the Kitchen Centre for Music and Video, NYC 78.

Peckertracks     Stan Dragland
Fiction     144 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 136 1 pb
    If you grew up in a small town, went to choir practice till the advent of Elvis Presley, collected cats at 5 cents a head, knocked over outhouses at Halloween, cheered fights in the hockey arena, thought you were smarter than your teacher and wanted your hair cut in a very specific way throughout your teens - then this book will bring that world back to you. Peckertracks captures that brutal world of one's teens with hilarious dialogue and brings back to life characters and situations you hoped you had escaped for good.
    'This is the kind of book with which young Canadians should be introduced to prose literature; but it will hardly appear on any high school reading list. As you read it, you simply know it's all bone-true.' - Ottawa Revue

ReVisions     Marcia Resnick
Visual     108 pp     11 x 8 1/2     0 88910 080 2 pb
    'Despite rather elaborately avoiding any overt reference to pulsating genitalia or full penetration, the fabulous Marcia has magically succeeded - with a delicately searching tongue here, a pert and enticingly pantied (as though specially gift wrapped for the viewer) derriere there ... succeeded, I say, in her subliminally erotic design, and I found myself, on more than one occasion, responding to the imagery with a healthy and ever-increasing tumescence.' - Terry Southern
    '... the essence of adolescence.' - William Burroughs
    'Sharp ... for a girl.' - Allen Ginsberg

The Service     Paul Quarrington
Fiction     184 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 116 7 pb
    Hilarious and bawdy, The Service gives new dimensions to the satiric portrayal of the little man overwhelmed by uncaring technocracy, and to the little man's dependence on shrink, guru or master. While its characters are as small as those of Barth's The End of the Road, their fantasies are large - and boldly erotic.
    'The Service is a strange book ... funny, odd, imaginative, and peculiarly sensitive.' - Random Scan
    'The setting is urban, the characterisation was grotesque, the plot fantastic, the action flamboyant. There is a plethora of ripe language.' - The Ottawa Revue
    'An old-fashioned medicine show ... a literary midway.' - CKRG Radio

The Story So Far 5     Douglas Barbour, Editor
Fiction     176 pp     5 3/8 x 8 3/4     0 88910 104 3 pb
Series: The Story So Far
    This fifth volume in the ongoing anthology of current short fiction includes work by Jack Hodgins, Daphne Marlatt, Stephen Scobie, Bill Kinsella, Tom Marshall, Wayne Clifford, Penny Kemp, Kent Thompson and others, as well as newcomers like Caterina Loverso, Elvina Boyko and David Arnason. The Story So Far's policy of rotating editorship with each volume guarantees the reader an exciting, stimulating reading experience. Illustrated.
    'One of the only two annual collections of short stories that readers can depend on.' - Hamilton Spectator
    'A remarkable variety of Canadian short stories ... valuable for the exposure it gives to daring writers.' - Random Scan
    'A nicely balanced selection of both established and aspiring writers.' - Winnipeg Tribune

Terrific at both Ends     Victor Coleman
Poetry     96 pp     6 x 6     0 88910 044 6 pb
    With photos by David Hlynsky.
    The poems in Coleman's first collection since Stranger (Coach House Press, 1974) are the reticent cries of a poet ill at ease in a purely literary tradition; they demand from the reader much more than a cursory hunt for content.
    Listed in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as Traffic at Both Ends.

Three Plays     George F. Walker
Drama     144 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 078 0 pb
    George Walker rides the thin line between private vision and public domain. First produced at the Factory Lab Theatre, these plays reveal George Walker's unerring eye for detail in the ruins of culture and his ability to combine these details into a world at once funny and mysterious.
    'George Walker is one of those people who writes comedies because he cannot bear the indifference of the universe.' - Anonymous
    The collection includes Bagdad Saloon, Beyond Mozambique Ramona and the White Slaves.