Announcing A Cemetery for Holes by Tom Prime & Gary Barwin

Gordon Hill Press is pleased to announce A Cemetery for Holes, a collaborative book of poetry by Tom Prime and Gary Barwin to be published in fall 2019.

Tom Prime has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria (Specializing in Poetry). He has a BA at Western University. He has been published in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The Northern Testicle, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. His first chapbook, A Strange Hospital, was published on Proper Tales Press. His latest chapbook, Gravitynipplemilkplanet Anthroposcenesters, was published on above/ground press.

Gary Barwin is the author of twenty-two books of poetry, fiction and books for children, including the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019). His writing and recordings have appeared in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally—from Readers Digest to Granta. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), three-time recipient of the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, winner of the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature, and co-winner of the  bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award.

In A Cemetery for Holes, a collaborative work between the two writers, poetic language bends and breaks, resists and reforms under emotional stress. Family trauma is reflected in the dislocating rage and surrealism of many of these poems. Consensual reality shifts with nonconsensual harm. There is an emptiness—the “holes” of the title—at the heart of this book which is, ultimately, fought against, buried and rendered impotent. While engaged in the struggle with trauma, the poems also strive to use poetry as a way to rebuild, to console, to rediscover the world, its beauty, tenderness, humour, and joy.