A raw, beautifully-composed collection exploring addiction, trauma, poverty, and the journey toward recovery and spirituality through the vernacular and iconography of the popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.

Total Party Kill (TPK): tabletop roleplaying slang for the situation of all characters dying in the same in-game encounter.

At turns nightmarish, hilarious, brutally honest, and heart-breaking, TPK maps an unforgettable course into the fantastic dark of back-alley dive-bars, demonic underworlds, various rock bottom floors, and a whole host of monsters, both imagined and frighteningly real.

TPK is a strange and deadly beast combining the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons with a real, life-or-death struggle for sobriety. Entirely unique in perspective and voice, the autobiographical speaker within changes fluidly between the poet, a variety of D&D characters, and combinations of both. The text within comprises a genre-bending quest where nothing—especially continued sobriety—is for certain. Operating less like traditional poetry and more like brief monologues or confessions—but still concentrating on metaphor, meter, and sound—TPK will appeal not only to lovers of the world’s bestselling roleplaying game, nor just to lovers of poetry, but for anyone whose life has been touched by addiction.

Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s. Power’s first novel, Blood Relatives (2010), won the Percy Janes First Novel Award, the Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, the ReLit Award, and was short-listed for the BMO Winterset Award. In 2008, Power was nominated for the Sobey Art Award, which recognizes the work of Canadian artists under forty.

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