Still tired of the same old Can Lit? Had your fill of The Beautiful Poetry? You’re not alone. For those of you who missed it the first time, BookThug is pleased to RE/present West Coast poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s first full-length collection of poems, CURIO: Grotesques and Satires From The Electronic Age.

CURIO: Grotesques & Satires From the Electronic Age is Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ellusive first book of poetry. Published just prior to Home of Sudden Service, a collection that went so far in another direction as to be nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2006, CURIO offers a very different view of what Bachinsky is capable of as a poet, and invites her readers to consider a much wider vision of her work as a whole. No one can truly hope to understand her work without reading this volume.

Witness Antonin Artaud climbing a beanstalk and eating his lover’s foot, as his most torrid affair is revealed in letters; fear the Spy Cam’s omniscient eye; test your paranoiac tendencies as an alien abductee; watch as The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender; rejoice in poems without people, poems without authors, and poems with no audience. Informed by the writings of the 20th century’s (and even the 21st's!) most eclectic authors, CURIO is quirky and sly—an ironic mixture simultaneously engaged with formal innovation and a retro avant garde that heralded the arrival of a brave new poet.

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006), and God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2009). Her work was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 2006, the Kobzar Literary Award in 2009, the Pat Lowther Award in 2010, and the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, and China. She is an instructor of creative writing at Douglas College in New Westminster where she is Poetry Editor for Event magazine. elizabethbachinsky.blogspot.com

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“Bachinsky proves herself to be a versatile, skilled poet unafraid to shake things up.” —The Globe and Mail

“The range of diction in these poems is wild, the diversity of influence deliciously idiosyncratic. How often have we seen John Milton and Lisa Robertson acknowledged between the same covers? Bachinsky’s willingness to range fearlessly through history sets her writing apart—or at least, places it in the company of equally daring poets like Robertson, Maine’s Jennifer Moxley, and Eliot himself.” —Fieldstone Review

“Through anagram, pillage, plunder and other structural plays, Curio enacts a wonderful revenge on expectation.” —Canadian Literature

“Bachinsky writes for us, the inheritors of a debased estate in which the last elegiac strains are heard chiefly as canned schmaltz piped into the corridors.” —K. Silem Mohammad

“Her work can straddle both sides: formal and experimental, personal and mathematical, with a keen ear for the erotically ridiculous.” —The Globe and Mail