The World Is a Heartbreaker inaugurates a new subgenre: imposter poetry. This collection is a set of 1600 pseudohaikus, bite-sized chunks of poetic goodness shotgunned at the distracted masses.

What’s a pseudohaiku? It’s the poetry of pure indulgence, a three-liner without the constraint, the pretension or the 5–7–5 syllable form. The subject matter? Relationships, cats, insecurities – themes recur and build into a kind of non-linear narrative.

These micropoems are easily digestible yet remarkably acute, a catalogue of scattered thoughts and pointed observations that go down like potato chips – betcha can’t read just one.

Sometimes sexy, sometimes scandalous, sometimes sentimental, but always three lines long, these pseudohaikus are the future of poetry in a world awash with sound bites, news clips, catchphrases. There are no pleasures like the guilty ones.

About Tjia’s earlier books:

‘Gentle Fictions is a tender, playful and inspiring poetry collection … Tjia’s poems are often silly, cute and irreverent, but artfully so.’

– Matrix

‘[Pedigree Girls] is hilarious. It’s also filled with raw, biting social criticism. [It’s] the weirdest comix you’ll read all year … discover the seductiveness of nihilism by way of an author with a sharp sense of humour.’

– NOW

Sherwin Tjia is a Montreal-based poet, painter and illustrator. He is the author of Gentle Fictions, Pedigree Girls, and The World Is a Heartbreaker (a finalist for the A.M. Klein Poetry Award). The Hipless Boy, a collection of short, interconnected stories told in graphic novel form was a finalist for the Doug Wright Award and for four Ignatz Awards. His most recent offering is an interactive adventure style book told from the point of view of a housecat entitled, You are a Cat! In his spare time, he organizes Slowdance Nights, Love Letter Reading Open Mics, Crowd Karaoke singalongs, and Strip Spelling Bees as Chat Perdu Productions. His invention, The E-Z-Purr, a CD with over an hour of cats purring, is available for download from CD Baby.

Sherwin Tjia's profile page