"[U]ndeniably fruitious and wild."
- Kemeny Babineau, The Danforth Review

False Maps for Other Creatures expands the taxonomy of insects, mushrooms and trees to inventive meditations on life and language. A fascinating and multi-layered journey across the geography of the imagination, False Maps for Other Creatures is the perfect book for those of us with no interest in the obvious.

Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, teacher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), Mycological Studies (2002), and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000). His most recent collection is the small blue (2007). In 2006 he published Double Helix, a collaborative "novel" written with Stephen Cain. Millar is the shadowy figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to cutting edge work by well-known and emerging North American writers, as well as Apollinaire`s Bookshoppe, a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. A long-time fixture of the Toronto writing and publishing scene, Jay has participated in such diverse projects as the UNBC/Via Rail Poetry Train, The Scream in High Park, Test Readings Series and Influency: A Poetry Salon. He is also the co-editor (with Mark Truscott) of BafterC, a small magazine of contemporary writing. Currently Jay teaches creative writing at George Brown College. Singled out in the introduction of The New Canon as a `young firebrand` (which he reads as `troublemaker`) working against what some hold dear to poetic tradition, Jay is one of Canada`s voices of authority and risk on innovative, experimental, contemporary poetry.

Jay MillAr's profile page

MillAr writes in a taut shorthand that combines the observational precision of a naturalist with a postmodernist interest in how language shapes our perceptions... But [he] doesn't abandon traditional lyricism altogether; indeed, he has a knack for ear-pleasing, evocative phrasing. In False Maps for Other Creatures, MillAr doesn't offer infallible paths of meaning through his meditations on place. But he does invite readers to make their own connections and discoveries.
--Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star

MillAr... is able to unite very theoretical concepts and the concerns of much avant-garde poetry with the form and concerns of otherwise conventional lyric poems... By drawing attention both to the landscape and the underlying structures at work in the creation of this landscape and its artistic depiction, MillAr has produced an excellent collection of occasional poems that are minimal in their execution and structurally impressive. The poems in False Maps for Other Creatures are dense but enjoyable, precise and flawless.
--Jonathan Ball, Prairie Fire

...a stimulating and tight collection, well worth picking up.
--Jesse Ferguson, Matrix

The poems in this book are undeniably fruitious and wild. They embody language as a growing, sensate thing. Each line quivers like an open ended nerve, and every line begins as if thought has just begun. In the end we begin all over. These poems are process and observation compressed into the moment before expansion. This is the mind cracked open to reveal an anthill of words.
--Kemeny Babineau, The Danforth Review

[MillAr's poem] "Let's Call These Poems St. Clair Avenue" blows the whole project of intellect away, deconstructs what's left of the project of civilization, blows it back to the womb, in fact, right back into the foetus ... [False Maps is] thoughtful, best read not as a series of lyrics or narratives, but as a portfolio of maps, to be spread out on a table and read with a compass with four south poles.
--Harold Rhenisch, Arc