A CBC Books' Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title

We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.

In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.

Michael Lista's reporting has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus and Toronto Life. He is the author of three books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough, and Strike Anywhere, a collection of essays. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow, a finalist for the Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism, and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award Gold Medals for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story, "The Sting," is being adapted into a television series for Apple TV+.

Michael Lista's profile page

Praise for Barfly

"The language is punchy, it can be raunchy, benefits from being read aloud, and when you do, like a Hole song, it’s full of bravado and vulnerability."
—Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

"Lista's poems . . . are fun, completely miserable, and almost certainly bad for you. Barfly should be affixed with a Health Canada warning. You must be nineteen or older to purchase this product. Not safe in any amount. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
—Nicholas Bradley, The Walrus

"With liquid refreshment, firehose, and fire escape, besotted Barfly is a sobering experience."
—The Seaboard Review

"Exquisitely raw and vulnerable."
—Tara Henley, Lean Out

"With his own distinctive style of cadence, rhythm, word driven imagery, and emotional reach, the poems comprising Michael Lista's last volume of verse is an extraordinary, memorable, and unreservedly recommended."
—Midwest Book Review

"After a ten-year hiatus from poetry—and out of nowhere—Michael Lista has dropped an instant classic. The poems in this book are profane, pugilistic, and moving, with wickedly funny rhymes to boot. Barfly is an uncompromising, messed-up masterpiece. I fucking love it."
—Jason Guriel, author of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles

"Like supremely eloquent graffiti written on the wall of a magnificent palace, except the palace is the world, and the world is on fire."
—Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure

Praise for Michael Lista

"Provocative and profound but eminently readable, Strike Anywhere demonstrates a critic of high order, unrestrained. It's great fun watching Lista play with matches."
—Foreword Reviews

"There aren't many Canadian books of poetry that are anticipated with quite so much excitement as Michael Lista's debut, which has been the talk of the town for some time. But the book outpaces the expectations even of those kindly disposed to it.”
—Quill and Quire

“Bloom is all one might hope for in a book of poetry: an unencumbered, nervy fusion of imagination and form.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

"Lista has here brought together potent ingredients, at once harmonious and dissonant, in a container with metal enough to withstand blasts from poems being split apart and reincarnated."
—Globe and Mail

“A brilliant, erudite new voice."
—Montreal Gazette