Lynn Crosbie

From the acclaimed author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night, an acidly funny, raw, and devastating love story of a decrepit, fallen film star and the young feminist filmmaker who revives his career.Set in disparate parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and very famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his disastrous fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out. The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its harrowing denouement and manage to save each other from their paths of torment and dizzying spirals of decline. But when Parnell is offered the chance to perform in the sequel to Ultraviolence, the feature film that made him famous — and to work again with its brilliant but merciless director — he and Annabel are forced to wrestle with their fractured pasts as the extreme, fleeting, and dangerous world of fame threatens to divide them.

"The dense hermeticism in Eyre's vision generates a fascinating journey for the viewer, rewarded with a glimpse into a very complex psyche. A magnificent body of work." ?Canadian Art Known for the theatricality of her self-portraits and the doubles that populate her images, disrupting the fixity of identity, Janieta Eyre is one of Canada's most original, provocative, and internationally recognized photographers. Spanning her seven major series (1993?2013), Incarnations is the first collection to make accessible a representative body of her work, including contributions by prominent Canadian writers and artists.

In her first poetry collection in more than a decade, celebrated novelist and poet Lynn Crosbie creates a sustained and confessional record of her father’s illness.The Corpses of the Future is a sustained, confessional new collection of poems by Lynn Crosbie. It tells the story of her father’s battle with frontotemporal dementia and blindness following a stroke. The poems chronologically recount the poet’s conversations and time with her father and capture his still-astonishing means of communicating. The book’s title is his sardonic remark. Crosbie considers dementia to be a symbolic language, and as such similar to poetry. The author’s attempts to understand her father’s distress, pain, fear, and brave love are assisted by her understanding of the “negative capability” required of readers of poetry.This is a harrowing book, with moments of joy and even levity. It is a collection of poetry about love, and love’s persistence, even under the most unspeakable circumstances.

Does true love have supernatural power? Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain. Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed. Her mother is an alcoholic grunge relic from Seattle, whose recollections, books and music help ignite Evelyn’s love for Cobain—a love so painfully strong that it summons the deceased singer to her side. When Evelyn is taken to the hospital after an overdose, she awakens to find Cobain—who has little to no memory of his former life—convalescing in the bed beside her. Once united, they quickly become addicted to drugs and each other. Cobain—renamed Celine Black—and Evelyn escape the hospital and run off together, determined to have everything they want. Inevitably, they become infamous musicians, but despite their mutual devotion, the couple is tormented by strong passion and jealousy. As their celebrity grows, their relationship becomes more excessive, and an episode of sexual violence explodes, shockingly, into murder. A highly original work of haute fan fiction, written in Crosbie’s poetic and emotionally evocative prose, Where Did You Sleep Last Night is an imaginative, surprisingly funny, and touching novel about the adamant persistence of love.

Originally published in 1998, Lynn Crosbie brought her unique voice to the forefront of Canadian poetry with this important collection of verse. Hers is a world of Shakespeare, skinheads, and centurions; and hers is a life stripped to the basics and then reconstructed with relish, every brick scrutinized meticulously.In Queen Rat her language is urban, but her soul is universal as she explores that which makes up everything.Featuring a new introduction by poet and musician Michael Turner.

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks Deft with matters both low- and highbrow (here are stories about 80s big-hair bands and the lasting, theological value of the Rocky series; here, too are stories contemplating critical theory and fine art), Life Is About Losing Everything speaks with manic yet grave authority about risking and losing everything, and then sorting through the remains to discover what is beautiful, what is trash, and what, ultimately, belongs.

At once casting aside and reinventing the confessional mode, Liar is a booklength monument to love found, betrayed, renounced, and ultimately accepted as transformative. The white-hot immediacy of detail and scorching emotional honesty of Liar make for a compelling tour through one lover's accounting for her own actions and those of her beloved. From the delusion of ownership to the pain of estrangement, Crosbie's surgical intelligence exposes what romantics so often refuse to acknowledge: the lover's own complicity in her joy and suffering. Swinging between the grotesque and the beautiful, Crosbie's depiction of the lover adrift alters how we think of the love poem -- indeed, how we think of passion itself.

A groundbreaking deconstruction of the classic 1950 film All About Eve, Phoebe 2002 is a collaborative epic poem/essay that zings in and out of the scenes and makes a thousand connections within the world of popular culture. Drawing from high and low sources, the poets relate All About Eve to such epics as Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene, The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as to other movies (Valley of the Dolls, Rosemary's Baby, Silence of the Lambs) and television shows (Gilligan's Island, The Twilight Zone, Scooby-Doo).~The figure of Bette Davis assumes heroic proportions as she descends into a Dante-esque Inferno (a drunken party) and goes on to do battle with husbands, directors, studio heads and archrival Joan Crawford. At the same time, Davis's character, Margo Channing, must contend with nefarious Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), a young fan who attempts to usurp her success as an actress. The poem builds toward the pivotal "powder room scene," where Eve's true nature is revealed and culminates in her winning a coveted Best Actress award. The authors identify Eve's sin (hunger for fame) as the root of the power- and award-mongering prevalent in contemporary American culture. ~Inspired by nine muses (Dunaway, Taylor, David, Crawford, Head, Breckenridge, Susann, Sexton and Plath) who make appearances throughout, Phoebe 2002 is a treasure trove of poetic forms woven seamlessly into a text that pushes the limits of poetry and film criticism. "The result," writes poet D.A. Powell, "is an utter triumph, a contemporary Satyricon." The authorial trio of Phoebe 2002 has dared to imagine the all and about of All About Eve (a film with a few things to say about ambition), and the result--full of obsessive details, zany tangents, cinephile gossip, rejuvenated poetic forms, literary "visitations," and true confession--is an audaciously original work to which the only fitting response is wild applause. --Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Placebo Effects by Lynn Crosbie, Jeffery Conway and David Trinidad. Paperback, 7 x 10 in./650 pgs / 0 color 0 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20146