Coach House Books: 208 books

For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis's lively, thoughtful and refreshingly...

YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive. The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight. What...

What might a word lose – or gain – without its prefix? Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings – radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate – to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and...

While digging through the Nobel Archives in Stockholm, trying to figure out why his hero, Sigmund Freud, never received a Nobel Prize, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the unsolicited self-nominations in the museum’s ‘Crackpot’ file, there are six letters addressed to Mr. Ragnar...

If reading most short story collections is like canoeing gently down a tranquil and picturesque river, then reading Spencer Gordon's Cosmo is like riding a jetski over Niagara Falls with Leonard Cohen whispering in your ear. You'll join Matthew McConaughey as he drives naked across the desert in a...

Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed...

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical...

A cultural planner's immodest proposal: change how we think about children and we just might change the world. We live in an ‘adultitarian’ state, where the rules are based on very adult priori- ties and understandings of reality. Young people are disenfranchised and power- less; they understand...

IThese poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception,...

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at...

Steve Reinke is one of the most intriguing artists we've got; his scope is enormous, his imagination absolutely singular. His video art — The Hundred Videos, Anthology of American Folk Song, Anal Masturbation and Object Loss — practically define the genre. Reinke tells us, in 'Kitchener–Berlin,'...

An old man in a military uniform and a Santa hat is dumped at the police station. He doesn’t speak English, and a lawyer’s business card is baited on the meat hook that hangs on his neck. As a lawyer, a police officer and a translator struggle to unravel the truth, they uncover a past that won’t...

His body, like yours, would lie mute as a plum until a vigilant limb came to a decision. As you might have guessed I've come to one myself. Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these...

Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry Nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Gerald Lampert Award. With cameos by jackalopes, Glenn Gould, homemade spaceships and Carl Linnaeus, these poems are remarkable for their technical agility and their restless inventiveness. There's...