Attenuations of Force
by Lori Cayer
ISBN: 978-1-897181-31-7
Price: $15.95

Attenuations of Force is a collection that commands our attention. Unnerving and charming in turns and at all points, linguistically supple, Cayer’s fierce, unflinching poems of selves made and unmade, of postmodern lusts and blind faith, will torque your brain around. Whether Cayer is mapping a weather that “drums your body apart” or riffing off a neo-gothic Jeff Goldblum morphing into a fly, her poetic altered states and stated alterations will dazzle you. No question, Cayer means business.”

—Jeanette Lynes

Children of Ararat
by Keith Garebian
ISBN: 978-1-897181-32-4
Price: $15.95

This is a momentous collection rendered by a poet in his prime. Children of Ararat takes the reader on a harrowing journey beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and continuing on to the denial that lingers to this day. While the horror is made clear, there is something oddly joyful in the mourning, in the poet’s ability to give voice to the long-dead. Without hyperbole, the poet evokes the gruesome events and articulates how, as the inheritor of his father’s experiences, he finds himself ‘trapped in an abyss’ created nearly a century ago. As with his previous collection, Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Garebian once again creates a living elegy that at times reaches almost beyond words.

—Jeff Round, www.jeffreyround.com

Confessions of an Empty Purse
by S. McDonald
ISBN: 978-1-897181-33-1
Price: $15.95

A book of poetry that reads compulsively like a novel – the anguished and ultimately courageous story of an individual caught between genders. The narrator is caught in the funhouse mirror of movies and pop culture, between dreams and self-loathing. These poems must be read in tandem with 1960s/70s sexual liberation classics: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966), a novel never-old; and Rosemary Daniell’s Sexual Tour of the Deep South (1974), a set of “happening” poems.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

ex nihilo
by Adebe D. A.
ISBN: 1-897181-34-8
Price: $15.95

Ex Nihilo is a bold, beautiful, and timely collection of poetry. Deeply imbued with a rhythm as deep as Langston’s rivers, Adebe D.A. choreographs her words to dance on and off the page — her canvas. A remarkable remix of language and history, Ex Nihilo moves us to places we have not yet considered. A call to both thought and action, Adebe confronts and celebrates her polychromatism. She is a major voice of a new generation.

—M.K. Asante, Jr.

Fallacies of Motion
by William Nichols
ISBN: 978-1-897181-35-5
Price: $15.95

Here is contemporary wisdom in verse. Imagine ancient Solomon revived and even more cynical, witty, precise, and scathing. These lyrics are delightfully arch and delicately stern. They range from wry takes on technology and white-collar conundrums to introspective riffs on grief, loss and the compensations of travel.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

Falling Blues
by Jannie Edwards
ISBN: 978-1-897181-36-2
Price: $15.95

Familiar comforts – marital beds, teacups – are balanced on the knife edge of language, scissored into poetic forms from villanelle to blues. The result is attentive and disconcerting. The beautiful success of this superb collection is due to the use of verbs, always freshly precise and colourfully sound.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

Learning to Count
by Douglas Burnet Smith
ISBN: 978-1-897181-37-9
Price: $15.95

Travel writing used to be a nostalgic adventure-story or anthropological ghetto of non-fiction. This book shows that the experience of crossing borders and negotiating cultures is integral to anyone alive to – and in – the world. The poems are a layered patina, evoking not only the sensual present of France, Rome, Corsica and Halifax, but also their complex pasts, interpreted over and over through art.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

[sic]
by Nikki Reimer
ISBN: 978-1-897181-38-6
Price: $15.95

Gorilla condoms? Goldilocks’ bent-over cootchie? Gonzo cocaine? Everything’s 4-sale when language is loosed as it is ici (icy) (sic). These poems are a pile-up of pop culture at “the intersection of Art and Commerce”, and the city is caught at the stoplight.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

Standoff Terrain
by Jocko Benoit
ISBN: 978-1-897181-39-3
Price: $15.95

A guy looks for love in all the wrong places, but comes up with all the right lines. What happens when Sun Tzu’s The Art of War meets the Indian erotic-religious text The Kama Sutra? Well, you get philosophical verse that’s fun, frank, and funky.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

White Shirt
by Laurie MacFayden
ISBN: 978-1-897181-40-9
Price: $15.95

This is the “classic” hard-drinking, hard-living, gravelly poet’s voice – only it comes from a woman. It’s a bust-out-of-the-closet voice where occasional touchstone rhymes and furious lists score the page. The poems are stripped down, poignant, exact, and as heartily playful as any serious blues. Here is Sappho crossed with the Supremes.

—Jury, Dektet 2010