CURIO: Grotesques and Satires From the Electronic Age

Tired of the same old Can Lit? Had your fill of The Beautiful Poetry? You’re not alone. BookThug is pleased to present West Coast poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s first full-length collection of poems, Curio: Grotesques and Satires FromThe Electronic Age. Witness Antonin Artaud climb a beanstalk and eat his lover’s foot as his most torrid affair is revealed in letters; fear the Spy Cam’s omniscient eye; test your paranoiac tendencies as an alien abductee; watch as The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender; rejoice in poems without people, poems without authors and poems with no audience. Informed by the writings of the 20th Century’s (and even the 21st Century’s!) most eclectic authors, Curio is quirky and sly – an ironic mixture simultaneously engaged with formal innovation and the Retro Avant Garde that heralds the arrival of a brave new poet. It’s a book, it’s a job, it’s about bloody time.

Elizabeth Bachinsky’s poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines and anthologies including Matrix, The Malahat Review, and Geist;  In Fine Form: The Book of Canadian Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005), Whitewall of Sound: Contemporary Canadian Concrete Poetry (housepress, 2003), and Pissing Ice: An Anthology of ‘New’ Canadian Poets (Bookthug, 2004). In 2004, her poetry received an honorable mention for the Bronwen Wallace award. She lives in the suburbs of Vancouver where she is the writer in residence for the communities of Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows BC, an apprentice bookmaker at Barbarian Press, and the poetry editor for Event magazine.