In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger's sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger's ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our dailylives.

Making use of the ghazal's original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger's four sections move from examinations of gender in "Iron John" and "Bloody Mary," to an ironic investigation of common experience in "Idiot Wind," to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in "Blind Date."

In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets--John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib, and more--but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger.

Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, The Chimney Stone urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realized, Winger's poems are a vital addition to the ghazal's continued evolution.

Rob Winger grew up country in small-town Ontario before graduating to post-punk and new wave. His first book, Muybridge's Horse, was named a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2007, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, Ottawa Book Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. An active editor and teacher, Rob recently completed a PhD in literature and cultural studies in Ottawa. He and his family live in the folk-rock hills northeast of Toronto. His second collection of poetry is The Chimney Stone (2010). Visit Rob's website at http://www.robwinger.blogspot.com/

Rob Winger's profile page

The Chimney Stone at first seems to be a book about love, then suddenly a book about influence (perhaps the influence of love and a love of one's influences) and finally, a book that parses the often testy question of inspiration in its most basic, arcane, and visceral senses. There's great skill here line to line, word to word, but the quiet directness of the poems is what shines; art not just the nod to other art it always is, but a doorway to tackling the larger problems of being.
--Kevin Connolly, author

Rob Winger writes wonderful poems--musical, precise and insistent. In The Chimney Stone, Winger lovingly dismantles some great songs and uses their salvaged parts to build a surprising, beautiful new kind of lyric on the frame of an old one. It is a remarkable feat of empathy and nerve.
--John K. Samson, The Weakerthans

With an assortment of award winning work already before him, Rob Winger brings readers another fine volume with "The Chimney Stone". Thoughtful work as he discusses what's hot on the tongues of people today, he offers unique perspectives in the form of entertaining verse. "The Chimney Stone" is an excellent addition to any collection.
--James A. Cox, The Midwest Book Review

Long an admirer of the North American ghazal, Rob Winger ... adds his own voice to the storm. His is a thoughtful form, speaking to an entire list of previous practitioners ... and innumerable musical references. [W]hat Winger brings is a collage effect to his pieces, tight lines that allow a breath of flexibility, scattered but held together, but not tight enough to confine, or choke.
--a href=http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2010/10/rob-winger-chimney-stone-ghazals.html>rob mclennan's blog

Winger's phrasing is lively and often richly metaphorical ... the poems in this book lay down an elliptical, zigzag path of tenuous connections and startling leaps in which room for the reader's imagination is, in effect, part of the composition.
―Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star