Quattro Books: 75 books

The poetry of Fermata, like the pause or hold in music which the word signifies, conjures the audible spaces between notes and the suspended moment. As the author puts it, this is “terse but lateral but lyrical writing.” Her words “are always on the threshold of becoming solid entities. In Fermata,...

In this dark satire of pop culture, an unnamed teenaged narrator describes his descent into violence and destruction. Drowning in wealth yet parentally neglected, he is starved for true attention and so aligns himself with a new student in his school, a budding Mephistopheles who manipulates him into...

Rough Wilderness chronicles one of the most famous tales of love, betrayal and redemption. Heloise and Abelard were medieval scholars whose taboo-breaking affair shocked clerics and fellow scholars and assured the star-crossed pair a place in history. These poems are contemporary in subject and tone,...

Much as one would define a garden, designed according to patterns of flowers, colours, and other sensory effects, the formalist quality of parterre becomes the garden itself. Conceived as a “curated” experience, Elías Carlo’s parterre is divided into three sections, each of which explores the...

The Rules of the Game reintroduces Ludwig Zeller, the great Chilean-Canadian “poet’s poet,” through a selection of his most engaging works. These short poems span a development of almost sixty years. They are Zeller’s brief songs of eroticism and love, adventure and nostalgia, youthful ardour,...

No other Canadian writer is as thoroughly conversant with the fertile tradition of surrealism as Beatriz Hausner. She bestows the imaginative energy and erotic power behind this abundantly creative way of seeing on every poem in Sew Him Up: stitching together intelligent invention and free-flowing...

Surrender is a wacky tale about a defunct school mascot, Chester the Beaver, and how he comes back to haunt the school principal responsible for his demise. It is a witty and outrageously funny book, abounding in linguistic pyrotechnics and saturated with literary and pop cultural references. But...

Helena’s disfigured face has defined her since childhood, yet with her older sister Grace’s unconditional love and encouragement, she is able to establish a sense of normalcy. Grace’s sudden death leaves Helena stunned and broken- hearted, but also leaves her with an unexpected inheritance....

At Dempsey’s Lodge, nothing is what it seems. Dempsey’s Lodge is the perfect getaway for families and young couples: the fishing is good, the air is fresh, the scenery is breathtaking. But beyond its pristine beauty and simple pleasures seethes the complexity of life: prejudice, love, lust, and betrayal … not to mention murder.

Set in an AIDS hospital in an undisclosed African nation, Tea with the Tiger concerns itself with medicine and ethics. The novel explores the corrupt alliance between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry in developing countries. The book is narrated by a young schizophrenic orderly who not only battles his own inner demons, but also the “medical” demons surrounding him.

Inspired by the extremely funny yet stylishly written works of Mordecai Richler (Barney’s Version) and Zadie Smith (White Teeth), Loopholes captures the zeitgeist of a disenchanted new generation of highly educated graduates who are woefully underemployed – and increasingly desperate. Soggy, sweaty...

In The Sea, Amela Marin takes the universal story of Exodus and pares it down to a seemingly simple allegory, in which a mother places her two children in her pockets and attempts to leave her besieged city, walk across war-ravaged mountainsides, and reach the sea. What happens along the way makes The Sea an ode to the humanity inherent in us all, in our darkest moments.

One False Move is Tim Conley’s debut collection of poetry. As it tightropes along meaning in language, our understandings of, and relationships with, one another, and even our continued survival, it balances elegance with clumsiness, and disenchantment with unrepentant feeling. It is a book for...

Sweet Nothing is an eco-feminist, spiritual and philosophical lament against the increasing speed and fragmentation of modern life. It draws parallels between some of the central ideas of existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis and neo-pagan spirituality, in order to make a case for the slowing down...