CURIO: Grotesques & Satires from the Electronic Age is Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ellusive first book of poetry. Published just prior to Home of Sudden Service, a collection that went so far in another direction as to be nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2006, CURIO offers a very different view of what Bachinsky is capable of as a poet, and invites her readers to consider a much wider vision of her work as a whole. No one can truly hope to understand her work without reading this volume.

Witness Antonin Artaud climb a beanstalk and eat his lover’s foot as his most torrid affair is revealed in letters; fear the Spy Cam’s omniscient eye; test your paranoiac tendencies as an alien abductee; watch as The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender; rejoice in poems without people, poems without authors and poems with no audience. Informed by the writings of the 20th Century’s (and even the 21st’s!) most eclectic authors, CURIO is quirky and sly – an ironic mixture simultaneously engaged with formal innovation and a retro avant garde that heralded the arrival of a brave new poet.

Bachinsky writes for us, the inheritors of a debased estate in which the last elegiac strains are heard chiefly as canned schmaltz piped into the corridors.
– K. Silem Mohammad

The range of diction in these poems is wild, the diversity of influence deliciously idiosyncratic. How often have we seen John Milton and Lisa Robertson acknowledged between the same covers? Bachinsky’s willingness to range fearlessly through history sets her writing apart – or, at least places it in the company of equally daring poets like Robertson, Maine’s Jennifer Moxley, and Eliot himself.
– Jenanette Lynes, Fieldstone Review

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of CURIO (2005), and Home of Sudden Service (2006) which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Bronwen Wallace award for poetry. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies and on film in Canada, the US, and abroad and has been translated into French and Chinese. Her third book of poems, God of Missed Connections is forthcoming in the Spring of 2009. She lives in Vancouver.

111 pages; 6x9 inches; perfectbound
ISBN 1 897388 40 3 | 9781 897388 40 2 (replaces 0 9737181 8 8)
With a new introduction by K. Silem Mohammad