What are you working on right now, Maurice Mierau?

I’m writing an essay for Contemporary Verse 2 (winter 2013 issue) about some poets I’ve spent time reading recently, including (if there’s space), Don Paterson, Linda Besner, & Patrick Friesen. There’ll also be a new poem from my new collection, Six, which I hope to finish revising before I’m dead.

Also am looking for a bookish editor willing to take an essay about Tim Bowling’s amazing memoir from 2010, In the Suicide’s Library, which Tim tells me was never reviewed in Canada (depressing, surprising, unsurprising). It’s about Weldon Kees and bibliomania and being a dad and worrying about the end of the world while obsessing about poetry. Fantastic stuff. And since it’s a Gaspereau book, it’s gorgeous.

I finished a memoir in January about adopting my 2 youngest sons in Ukraine, my father’s traumatic childhood in Soviet Ukraine, and about me learning to be a semi-competent dad & son. Am now shopping it to publishers.

I continue to edit The Winnipeg Review, a lit zine; am preparing the fall issue, due out around Sept 17, right now. TWR got a small Canada Council grant this summer, which will help us survive. One of Patricia Young’s poems that I published last year recently appeared in the 2012 Best Canadian Poetry in English.

Then the books I edited this spring for Enfield & Wizenty are coming off the press. Méira Cook’s debut novel, The House on Sugarbush Road, was the first to ship. I’ll introduce Cook at the McNally Robinson launch in Winnipeg on Sept. 10. The novel is brilliant, sensual, set in 1990s South Africa with a Balzacian cast of characters. The book looks pretty damn good too (thank you Relish).

The First One's Free.

The First One's Free.

To celebrate (over) a decade since my first book, I’m offering it for free.

EX MACHINA is a choose-your-own-adventure-style poetry-novel hybrid about how machines have changed what it means to be human.

Fill out this form so we can stay in touch, and I’ll send you the book.