Barfly

Description

A CBC Books Best Poetry Book of 2024 A CBC Books Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 AToronto StarMost Anticipated Spring TitleWere in love, but were still Millennials. / Whats wrong with our hearts is congenital.InBarfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Audens meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems inBarflyare alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.Praise forBarflyAt once hilarious and raw,Barflyuses Byronic rhymes and Audens meters to discuss twenty-first century topics.CBC Books Best Canadian Poetry of 2024The language is punchy, it can be raunchy, benefits from being read aloud, and when you do, like a Hole song, its full of bravado and vulnerability.Deborah Dundas,Toronto StarListas poems . . . are fun, completely miserable, and almost certainly bad for you.Barflyshould be affixed with a Health Canada warning. You must be nineteen or older to purchase this product. Not safe in any amount. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.Nicholas Bradley,The WalrusWith liquid refreshment, firehose, and fire escape, besottedBarflyis a sobering experience.The Seaboard ReviewExquisitely raw and vulnerable.Tara Henley,Lean OutWith his own distinctive style of cadence, rhythm, word driven imagery, and emotional reach, the poems comprising Michael Listas last volume of verse is an extraordinary, memorable, and unreservedly recommended.Midwest Book ReviewAfter a ten-year hiatus from poetryand out of nowhereMichael Lista has dropped an instant classic. The poems in this book are profane, pugilistic, and moving, with wickedly funny rhymes to boot. Barfly is an uncompromising, messed-up masterpiece. I fucking love it.Jason Guriel, author ofThe Full-Moon Whaling ChroniclesLike supremely eloquent graffiti written on the wall of a magnificent palace, except the palace is the world, and the world is on fire.Stephen Marche, author ofOn Writing and FailureMy new favorite book to recommend to people who say they dont like poetry. Unpretentious, tragicomic, and thoroughly contemporary, its readable and relatable in ways that ought to appeal to a broader-than-most audience without alienating poetry fans seeking formal rigor and intellect.Tony P, Books & Company (Milwaukee, WI)Praise for Michael ListaProvocative and profound but eminently readable,Strike Anywheredemonstrates a critic of high order, unrestrained. Its great fun watching Lista play with matches.Foreword ReviewsThere arent many Canadian books of poetry that are anticipated with quite so much excitement as Michael Listas debut, which has been the talk of the town for some time. But the book outpaces the expectations even of those kindly disposed to it.Quill and QuireBloomis all one might hope for in a book of poetry: an unencumbered, nervy fusion of imagination and form.Winnipeg Free PressLista has here brought together potent ingredients, at once harmonious and dissonant, in a container with metal enough to withstand blasts from poems being split apart and reincarnated.Globe and MailA brilliant, erudite new voice.Montreal Gazette