The Lightning of Possible Storms

Aleya’s world starts to unravel after a café customer leaves behind a collection of short stories. Surprised and disturbed to discover that the book has been dedicated to her, Aleya delves into the strange book… A mad scientist seeks to steal his son’s dreams. A struggling writer, skilled only at destruction, finds himself courted by […]

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The Politics of Knives

If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming — combining poetry, fiction, and essay, with topics ranging from Kafka […]

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Ex Machina

A long poem at the fringes of the Canadian tradition, Ex Machina is a latticework of poetic and philosophical statements concerning the symbiosis of humans, books, and machines — entwined in a choose-your-own-adventure-style format. A series of three intertwining sequences, the reader is encouraged to move back and forth from statement to statement. The reader […]

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The National Gallery

My fourth poetry book, the first in seven years, swirls chaos and confession together. At the book’s heart is a question: Why create art? A series of poetic sequences torment themselves over this question, offering few answers and taking fewer prisoners. A startling diversity of styles and subjects feed into this maelstrom, and its dark […]

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Clockfire

77 poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce — plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience or the laws of physics are defiled. Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball’s “plays” break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category […]

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