When Gellhorn, a notable poet, begins a university residency in a “dynamic metropolis” and stays at the illustrious Máximo College, he finds himself scandalized, and for little known reason. Scrutiny by his new academic neighbours is the least of his worries, as he learns of the existence of Aaron Schnell, his physical pseudo-twin, and an actor and film “double.” The Chair shares fragments from the oeuvre of Thomas Claque, a recently deceased author who contrived the tale of the pseudo-twins. The Chair’s scholarship leads him to the real Máximo College, where he revives those characters and scenarios, before travelling to a smaller prairie town where he reimagines one of Claque’s risqué getaways. There he meets a young woman doing her creative thesis on the double in literature. Petra, a police clerk in an entirely different prairie city, receives a photograph of a missing person and recognizes a passenger from her weekday commute. Non-routine surveillance draws her deeper into his world until a global pandemic abruptly stalls her progress. Her romantic prospect soon leads to a greater mystery punctuated by the words, TULPA MEA CULPA, although its uncanny truth will be ultimately less provocative than serial coverage in the Prairie Pulse. Tulpa Mea Culpa is a literary tour-de-force and solidifies Morse as one of Canada’s most exciting writers today and proves why he is a two-time Governor General Award nominee.

Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages (finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire), and Prairie Harbour and Safety Sand.Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series, including Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks.Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including UBC. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Garry Thomas Morse's profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General's Award

“Incalculable, engaging, and exhilarating.”

Marina Endicott