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Anvil Press Poetry Triple Bill: MillAr, Ross & Laba

Now it can be told! The biggest poetry event since the opening of Al Capone's vault! But minus the debris and plus some poetry.

Come celebrate the launch of three exciting, rollicking books of poetry that can't be pigeonholed!

This is the launch you didn't know you were waiting for! (Unless, of course, you did.)

First up: Jay MillAr's I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You.

Spanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar’s development as a poet: the wonder years of the 1990s culled from a variety of self-published micropress publications, most of which are hiding in special collections, poems from his trade books issued between 2000 and 2015, and new poems that have emerged during his present condition as one of Canada’s most progressive co-publishers.

Next on the agenda: Stuart Ross's Motel of the Opposable Thumbs

In Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, Stuart Ross continues to reject trends in Canadian poetry and further follow the journey he began over four decades ago. In this eclectic, pleasurable gathering of poems and sequences, Ross unapologetically leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd. Under the pressing shadow of mortality, he embraces this panoply of approaches to respond to our cantankerous existential dilemma. All that, and this book is structured after Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4!

And round it all off: Mark Laba's The Inflatable Life

The fourth entry in the Feed Dog imprint, Mark Laba’s second full-length poetry collection offers up a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation. Laba draws on everything from gritty pulp fiction to Borscht Belt humour, from dime-store ventriloquism to twelve-cent comic books, hurling his surprising and often shocking vaudeville narratives from the peak of the Jewish Alps. Some may call these surreal poems literary atrocities while others hail them as lyricism for an impossible century. Thing is, if Mark Laba didn’t write these poems, no one else would.

With readings by MillAr, Ross, and — by Skype — Laba. Maybe even a Q&A. Yes, probably a Q&A.

And book will be for sale.

And all in the awesome back room of the Supermarket!

Admission is free!

Earlier Event: June 9
FreeFall Sundays Open Mic Night
Later Event: June 12
Vegan Rock! 11