At times comic, tender, dark, compassionate, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world. Raging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are mysterious, luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness, the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, "what makes them so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder."
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of 17 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for both teens and children. His most recent poetry collection is Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press, 2014.) A novel, Yiddish for Pirates will appear with Random House Canada in 2016. Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, introduced and edited by Barwin, will appear from Wilfrid Laurier University Press in spring 2015. Barwin is the winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition.