Swallowing Teeth: The Coach House Fall 2010 launch

Torontoist has a few pictures from the Coach House Books Fall 2010 launch here. I look like I'm in agony. Perhaps because it seems that I've just swallowed my teeth. But anything for the cause of poetry. Actually, the launch was fantastic. The location, the Revival, was great, there were tons of people -- a really attentive, enthusiastic audience, and a nice vibe all round. I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth (which I still have) into the new titles, particularly Jonathan Ball's Clockfire and Jon Paul Fiorentino's Indexical Elegies.

Jonathan Ball's Clockfire is a collection of short prose poem-like description/instructions for impossible plays. Something a bit Calvino or Borges, and also like Kenneth Koch's One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. From what I've read so far, it's charming, paradoxical, metaphysical, and clever, each little play a dramatic oxymoron.

I've also only started on Jon Paul Fiorentino's Indexical Elegies. It has a really great cover -- designed by Alana Wilcox -- which looks like an old card catalogue card, replete with the hole. The poems in this book are are moving, delicate-yet-wry piquant little word mobiles, about loss, connection, culture, and language. Grief Sudoku.

Jonathan Ball kindly wrote a nice little review of my The Porcupinity of the Stars and posted it over here. Thanks!