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A CBC Books Best Poetry Book of 2024 • A CBC Books Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring TitleWe’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital. In
Barfly, 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 Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in
Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.
List of contents
Forgive Me, Leonard
Auld Lang Syne
My Body Is a Temple
Kids
Putin
Able Archer
Based on a Story by Michael Lista
Dealing with Fans
The Bill
America
Cats
On the Disappearance of Roughly Eleven Billion Crabs and the
Cessation of Alaska’s Fishery
Traitorous Former Editors &
Cultural Apparatchiks
What It’s Like to Write a Book
Booze
Towards a Theory of Contemporary
Poetry
Bar Fights
Battle Raps
Nose Beers
War
Hamlet, Hamlet
Job, 23, in Hollywood
The Zoo
Draughts
Sports
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 3/5 Stars
Freedom Convoy
Mum
Snow
Alea Iacta Est
The Yips
Merkins
Carmine
I Have a Gun in My Mouth
I Want to Go to Mount Baldy
What If God Was One of Us?
Jeff
Fuck You
Going to the Moon
Apollo 11
Lebensraum
Identity Theft
My Love
Clouds
Reasons to Live
The Bar in Hell
Sartre?
Dusk
Earth
One Last Shot of Jameson
Barfly
Hungover
Acknowledgements
About the author
Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the
National Post and as the poetry editor of
The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes
Bloom and
The Scarborough;
Strike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and
The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of longform journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the
New Yorker,
The Atlantic,
Slate,
The Walrus,
Canadaland, and
Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at
Toronto Life and
Maclean's. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.
Summary
A CBC Books' Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title
We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.
In Barfly, 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 Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.
Foreword
- Print run: 1,000 copies
- Co-op available
- Advance reader copies
- Edelweiss digital review copies
- National TV & radio campaign
- National print media campaign
- Online and social media campaign
- Launch and festival appearances
