2023 Collections
Paul Killebrew’s Impersonal Rainbow & The Bisexual Purge
Canarium Books / Poetry / October 17, 2023 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8”, 160 pp / 978-1-7344816-6-2 / US $17.00
Paul Killebrew's new book contains two distinct and brilliant collections: Impersonal Rainbow gathers short meditations on life and its many sensations; The Bisexual Purge is a long poem which discusses “legal developments, cases, and arguments about both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination” while following events both personal and public during 2017.
Paul Killebrew was born in 1978 in Nashville, Tennessee. His other books of poetry are Flowers (2010), Ethical Consciousness (2013), and To Literally You (2017), all published by Canarium Books. He currently resides in Maryland with his family.
Anthony Madrid’s Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise
Canarium Books / Poetry / April 18, 2023 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8”, 96 pp / 978-1-7344816-4-8 / US $17.00
Buddhist poems denouncing Buddhism; ghazals written with the emotional palette of a seven-year-old. Animal poems to children; animal poems to adults. Also rubaʿiyat. In Anthony Madrid's fourth book, Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, the poet appraises a world “full of ancient things whose shapes and colors have changed.” Poems in this book originally appeared in Blackbox Manifold (UK), Boston Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Lana Turner, Little Star, and Poetry.
Anthony Madrid was born in 1968, raised in Maryland. He is the author of three other full-length books of poetry: I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, 2012), Try Never (Canarium Books, 2017), and There Was an Old Man with a Springbok (Prelude Books, 2019). He lives in Victoria, Texas with Nadya Pittendrigh.
Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday
Canarium Books / Poetry / October 17, 2023 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8”, 160 pp / 978-1-7344816-5-5 / US $17.00
Soon after Mutsuo Takahashi turned eighty, he published his magnum opus, Only Yesterday, a work containing 153 poems that showcase the poet's enormous erudition as he revisits the themes he has explored for the last five decades, while weaving in motifs and ideas borrowed from ancient Greek culture. The result is a dazzling piece of world literature that bridges East and West, new and ancient, all within a witty, idiosyncratic collection that's been translated beautifully by acclaimed translator Jeffrey Angles, whose work earned this book a grant from Japan Foundation.
Mutsuo Takahashi is one of Japan's most prominent living poets. Since first attracting the attention of the Japanese literary world in the 1960s with his bold evocations of homoerotic desire, he has published forty-eight books of poetry and numerous collections of essays, literary criticism, and fiction. In 2017, the Japanese government designated him as a Person of Cultural Merit, its highest award for literary figures.
Anthony Robinson’s Failures of the Poets
Canarium Books / Poetry / April 18, 2023 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8”, 96 pp / 978-1-7344816-3-1 / US $17.00
After more than 20 years of publishing poems in magazines and chapbooks, Anthony Robinson has brought together an incredible collection for his long-awaited first full-length book, Failures of the Poets. Full of beauty, heartbreak, humor, pain, absurdity, sorrow, friendship, and love, as well as bridges, family, lakes, God, feathers, and food, this is a book brimming over with thinking and with things, as Robinson's intense attention collides with the world. “All winter we waited / For the sun and now he’s here but will / He make it through another year?”
Anthony Robinson began writing poems while serving in the US Navy in the day-glo 1990s. He matriculated to the University of Oregon, where he later taught, in various capacities, for ten years. His poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Tiny, Verse, ZYZZYVA, and many other journals. He’s a founding editor of The Canary, and currently lives and writes in rural Oregon.