The Nerves Centre is a series of poems about performance (and other) anxiety, told through the jittery stop-and-start actions of a stagefright-afflicted Performer who can't speak while on stage. The Performer's linguistically vaudevillian performances are punctuated with sound poems that capture the moments of panic she experiences. Constructed from recordings of actual panic attacks that were poorly transcribed by increasingly confused transcription software, then reshaped into poems for the page, these sound and breath pieces create a palpable experience of a Performer caught in the moment of panic. These are poems with roots in vaudeville, silent comedy, Beckettian mime, sessions with your therapist, and stage fright. Never judgemental, always hopeful that this time the performance will work, Szczepaniak brings a slapstick sensibility to every poem, a deep compassion for anyone struggling to find their voice, trying to speak, or having trouble with a pesky boulder.

Angela Szczepaniak's writing has appeared in Mad Hatter's Review, Pilot, P-Queue, Phoebe, foursquare, among other journals and anthologies. She recently participated in a hygiene themed poetry-art project with LOCCAL, and as a result some of her work can be found on placards in the better public restrooms of Seattle. She studies and teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and lives mainly in Toronto.

These plays clustered about the themes of the fragility of love and the ephemerality of life. TULIP (2006). Commissioned and developed by Nightswimming Theatre. Set in the madness of 17th Century Holland during the spectacular and frighteningly strange Dutch obsession with tulip bulbs, TULIP is a wild play about greed, beauty, deceit and botany. The bubble bursts; within days, many are ruined. Starvation and poverty ensue. Adrift in a sea of menacing shadows, the characters of TULIP must now desperately try to reconstruct their shattered lives with only the broken mirror of their hopes and dreams to guide them. WILDEST DREAMS (2013). Developed by Nightswimming Theatre & Playwrights Workshop Montrèal. Poor old Jack. It just keeps going bad. Is that any way to have a life, thinks he? Would it rain?, he wondered, gazing fearfully into the dark grey sky. It smelt like rain. A conspiracy of nature? Its no good - Audrey's screwing around. And nobody cares. And nothing makes any sense. WILDEST DREAMS is the story of middle-aged love, or love past middle-age, or the failure of this love. ALL THINGS AT ONCE (2019). Developed by Playwrights Workshop Montrèal. A contemporary lamination, an elegy for the authenticity of experience, and for re-claiming one's own life. Which, after all, is the same as love. ALL THINGS AT ONCE features a giant Gulliver, dancing cows, ferocious boundaries, counterfactual history, and shocking deaths. The protagonist, the poet Byron - his delusion (not always charming but somehow courageously engaging) - drives him to seek out a frighteningly desperate truth to the raw reality of his life. A life where love and loss predominate the landscape.

Don Druick is a distinguished playwright, translator, a baroque flutist, and an avid bread baker. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Don Druick's plays and translations have been produced on stage, radio and television in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the USA. He has received twelve Canada Council grants in Theatre, Creative Writing, Performance Art; as well as grants from the Ministère des Affairs Culturale de Quèbec, the Japan-Canada Fund, the Laidlaw Foundation, and the Ontario Arts Council. Having lived in Vancouver and Montreal, Don Druick currently lives with artist Jane Buyers in Elmira Ontario, a small village 125 km west of Toronto. Don Druick's previous works include the award-winning plays Where is Kabuki?, Through The Eyes, Lie Doggo, and the hit CBC radio series Recipe for Murder. He is presently working on a novel entitled The Name We Didn't Know.

Brian Quirt is the founder and Artistic Director of Nightswimming, a dramaturgical company based in Toronto, and Director of the Banff Centre Playwrights Lab. With Nightswimming he has commissioned and developed 30 new works, created eight of his own plays, and directed the premieres and national tours of many Nightswimming projects including, new works by Don Druick, Carmen Aguirre and Anita Majumdar.

The protagonist of this novel, twice exiled, first from his birthplace, Budapest, Hungary, and then from the United States as a Vietnam draft resistor who settles in Montreal, becomes obsessed with a poem by W.H. Auden and a painting by the Dutch master, Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, an allegory about the nature of suffering that leads to his attempted suicide, the subsequent chaos of his life, and to his ultimate redemption. Set primarily in Montreal, the novel also travels to the places of the protagonist's past: the Europe of his childhood, the America of his adolescence, and the Montreal of his early adulthood through his memories and reflections. Despite its tragic-comic undertone, the novel profoundly explores the illusions we construct to provide value to our lives, the nature of love and the erotic, and the path towards compassion and meaning. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a subtly-crafted work, incorporating literary references, told in a fast-paced, engaging style. Alapi, known for his work on the writers of the New Underground as an editor and critic, presents a provocative edginess to his writing when it comes to sexuality and his lampooning of many of the sacred cows of our societal mores. As the British novelist Tony O'Neill wrote about his work: 'Alapi has a unique gift and it's one that most writers would kill to possess: he can move effortlessly from the poetic to the erotic, from the gritty to the heartbreaking, often in the space of a single paragraph.'

Zsolt Alapi is a short story writer, editor, and critic whose stories, articles, and reviews have appeared widely in Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, and France. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Alapi moved to Montreal, Quebec during the Vietnam War and finished his Ph.D. at McGill University. He taught literature at college and university for three decades and ran a micro-press, Siren Song Publishing, which featured writing from what The Guardian dubbed as 'The New Underground', edgy fiction that follows the path forged by the Beat and post-Beat writers of the latter part of the 20th century.

An intriguing story of a woman and artist in the grip of a major personal crisis and whose life becomes intertwined with that of her extraordinary, great grandmother, also called Kate. Written with great delicacy and acute understanding of the complexities of mind and heart, and enriched by the importance of film and painting in the heroine's life, Kate Wake offers an original, multi-genre narrative of woman in search of historical and contemporary truths. A novel as contemporary as the present moment, it is also a book deepened by connections with the past. Accessible, lyrical, factual, simple and complex, the writing conveys the many dimensions of the heroine's experiences and feelings. Kate Wake is a novel that narrates a working-through of loss by an individual compelled to return to the original scene (of loss), a sort of underworld rule by sleep, memory and the unconscious.

Winner of the Robert Kroetsch Creative Writing Award (University of Manitoba), Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a writer, editor and poet whose work has been published in Border Crossings, Prairie Fire, Herizons, and other magazines, including PhaenEx (the Journal of the Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture Association). She was co-founder and co-editor of Tarts, an arts and culture magazine, and for a number of years taught creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. JackPine Press published her poetry chapbook Umbrella Suites, and her play The Apprentice was produced at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. She lives in Winnipeg

Nearly Terminal resonates with a sense of foreboding at what may be seen as the social collapse of the individual self in a society that is being 'whitened out.' Incorporating and intertwining aspects of the personal love relationship with a sense of a self under scrutiny, by itself and an imagined Other, the focus becomes one of loss, solitude, and the existential sense of being in a vast universe that is defined by traces of life increasingly lived as forms of abstraction within a virtual, disembodied reality. With a younger audience in mind, with poetic diction that is not afraid to be bold and experimental in its statements and claims, and with a delicate use of techniques evoking lacunae and erasure to convey the unanswerability of some basic existential questions, Eleni Zisimatos presents a bleak and uncertain view of the world.

Eleni (Helen) Zisimatos is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Vallum Magazine, has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in poetry, and was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch Award, the Irving Layton Awards (in both poetry and fiction), and the Santa Fe Writers' Awards. She holds degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature, and currently lives in Montreal, Quebec.

A woman wins a fabulous lottery; a frustrated middle-age man waits for his wealthy father to die; an unemployed father and widower struggles to earn a living wage; an older man of means has an affair with a much younger woman; a privileged but harassed suburban woman and a homeless man meet in a subway station: each story, built upon familiar motifs, leads into the core of the characters' sense of who they are. The narrative drama arises from what they face and how they live during their present circumstances. For the readers, the stories transform the ordinary, which many have felt themselves, into a new dimension of experience. As a writer of short fiction whose very first collection The Cost of Living was nominated for the Governor General's Award, Radu evinces a sure voice and deft hand. Of his previous book Earthbound , also published by DC Books, a reviewer in The Fiddlehead states 'the variety is dazzling and somewhat daunting because Radu writes convincingly in all of these voices.' Anatanas Sileika confirms in The Toronto Star that Radu's earlier book of stories, A Private Performance, is a 'collection of sparkling gems.' Years of crafting the art of the short story has led to Radu's mastery of effect and style, not to mention an undercurrent of humour and wit, which enables him to handle emotionally charged and complex dramas. In the words of Prairie Fire reviewing Radu's collection Sex in Russia, 'displays the necessary empathy to reveal his protagonists'' natures, while his morally centered prose provides perspective.' Net Worth continues Radu's tradition of well-crafted and necessary stories.

Kenneth Radu is a seasoned, award-winning writer of novels, short stories, non-fiction, and poetry. His first novel, Distant Relations, received the Quebec Writers' Federation Award for Best English-language Fiction. A collection of stories, A Private Performance, was also honoured with the award. A previous collection, The Cost of Living, was nominated for the Governor General's Award. His most recent work includes two collections of stories, Sex in Russia, and Earthbound, both published by DC Books, as well as the novel Butterfly in Amber.

Excitement Tax uses a series of tonally various prose sonnets to trace the deeply uneasy relationship of a grown-up person and his imaginary friend, Walter Weaselbird. The pair crash through thickets of erudition in search of candy. Often they find candy.

JOHN EMIL VINCENT is a Montreal-based poet, editor, and archivist. He's taught literature, queer theory, and poetry writing at Concordia and Queen's in Canada and at Wesleyan, Haverford, and University of Miami in the US. He and his partner, Luis Loya Garcia, emigrated to Montreal in 2010 to get married and escape anti-immigrant laws and sentiment in the US. Vincent earned his BA in Religion and Literary Studies (French) from Williams College where he worked with Louise Glück. We went on to earn an MFA from Warren Wilson College (in North Carolina) where he worked with Heather McHugh and Larry Levis among others. Toward the end of his MFA he started his PhD in English across the state at Duke University where he studied under Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon. He was among the earliest cohort to graduate specializing in Queer Theory. While at Duke he published an essay on Swinburne and whipping in Eve's collection Novel Gazing and co-authored an article on Latinamericanism and My Own Private Idaho with Josè Estaban Muñoz. He recently earned his Masters Degree in Library Science (Archives) from Simmons College (in Boston). He has worked doing preservation work for John Ashbery in his home in Hudson, New York, and has worked helping organize James Tate's papers and books after his recent death. He served as Editor-at-Large for the Massachusetts Review, where he edited a double 'especially queer issue' packed with queer literary luminaries and a special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of the UMass-Amherst Program for Poets and Writers. He's served as poetry editor for the now-defunct Swink magazine and issue editor for tinywords (a web-based haiku journal). He has published poems in jubilat, Denver Quarterly, BlazeVOX, Slope, Spork, failbetter, Drunkenboat, and many other journals. A number of his poems appeared in an anthology of new gay poets, entitled This New Breed, edited by Rudy Kikel (Windstorm Creative 2003). He recently published a chapbook Cheshirization-- containing 9 poems from 'Excitement Tax' with Factory Hollow Press.