Punchy Writers (including me) this Sunday in Toronto

My last book, Dead Cars in Managua, was published as the inaugural poetry selection for DC Books' Punchy Writers series.

This Sunday, two new Punchy books are being launched in Toronto. I'm also reading. Punchy Poetry is edited by Jason Camlot and Punchy Fiction by David McGimpsey. Here's the guff on Sunday's hoedown:

Punchy Writers Series and DC Books are pleased to announce the Toronto launch of two new PUNCHY titles

Porny Stories
By EVA MORAN

and

Unisex Love Poems
By ANGELA SZCZEPANIAK

Join us for an evening of readings and cake featuring Eva and Angela

Plus a super bonus reading by

STUART ROSS (Dead Cars in Managua)

Sunday, November 23, 7:30 pm
The Magpie, 831 Dundas West (near Bathurst)
Free admission


Descriptions of the new books:

PORNY STORIES
Have you ever wondered what Woody Allen would be like if he were a woman stoked on chick-lit who lived in Toronto? Eva Moran has. Porny Stories is a collection of fiction that examines the neurotic, desperate, and impotent lady-world of Toronto, and shows a lot of leg while doing it. Bad boyfriends, jobs, and decisions plague the main character of each story in this titillating diary of explicitly dirty laundry. The status quo eludes the main characters. Lover after lost lover, one missed opportunity for a better life after the next, the characters can never seem to get it right but they keep trying in all the wrong ways. Basically, this is a book about badly needing to get a new life and desperately wanting to get laid and each character will die trying... or, well, not die... but will conjure many drunken shenanigans trying. The seemingly autobiographical approach of the pieces makes it feel like you are kneeling at a keyhole peering into a room full of bawdy comedy—tantalizing!

UNISEX LOVE POEMS
Angela Szczepaniak's debut poetry collection Unisex Love Poems sutures swatches of fiction, poetry, etiquette advice, slapstick legal antics, and gruesomely illustrated recipes for sweetbreads and love letters into a parody of manners and conduct. An autopsy of language, it makes you savour the visceral, tangible quality of the word. As it satirizes the language and conventions of love, food, courtship, and sexuality, this novel-in-poems will pluck your heart out and teach you how to prepare it as an intimate dinner for two.

I've really enjoyed reading from Dead Cars, perhaps because it's a very different kind of book for me. And so far I've read from it in New Denver, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, and probably some other places that aren't springing immediately to mind.

I don't think it's earned a single review anywhere, but that happens. Might be because I was so fortunate, review-wise, with I Cut My Finger. Might be because no reviewer thought it was interesting enough. Or maybe it just baffled people. I know it baffles me.

Come hear me read and help welcome my two new Punchy siblings into the world!

Over and out.