Books

anecdotes

KATHRYN MOCKLER'S DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION

With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.

Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.

“This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.

“We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening; from first periods to flashers; sticker books to maxi pad art; acid trips to blackouts; creepy professors to close calls.

In “The Dream House,” The Past and The Future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.

These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.

Book*hug Press, Sept 19, 2023

Cover Design by Malcolm Sutton

WATCH YOUR HEAD

A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.

Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical.
This is a call to climate-justice action.

Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia

Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto

Published by Coach House Books, 2020

Purchase book at Coach House Books.

me then you then me then

A poetry chapbook in collaboration with Gary Barwin & Kathryn Mockler

Published by knife | fork | book, 2020

Purchase book at knife | fork | book or contact Kathryn Mockler.

some theories

Kathryn Mockler & David Poolman

How do we exist in a world that may have already moved on without us?

Some Theories is a collection of drawings, little stories, poems, plays, and one-liners that explore failure, dread, resignation, and the end of the world.

Some Theories, 2017

Purchase book on Blurb or contact Kathryn Mockler.

The Purpose pitch

Drawing from a range of contemporary poetic traditions, The Purpose Pitch explores the overlap between narrative, pop culture, and the political. These poems are often funny, sometimes harrowing, and always unsettling. Through rants, narrative prose poems, absurdist dialogues, brutal police reports, invented biographies of real people, Google search results, and celebrity-interview mash-ups, Mockler shows us just how Boschian Western culture is in the twenty-first century.

Jonathan Ball, the Winnipeg Free Press
Kathryn Mockler’s The Purpose Pitch combines True Detective levels of despondence with the wry humour of a Wilde. If Rust Cohle published poetry, it would go a little something like this: "How old were you when you realized the world was a nightmare from which you could never wake?"

Published by Mansfield Press, 2015

To purchase, contact Kathryn Mockler.

onion man

Onion Man is a sparse and intense series of linked poems told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn-canning factory. The poems follow her relationships with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.”

“In Onion Man Kathryn Mockler takes an age-old metaphor and applies it to the construction and consumption of the book: each page turned a layer peeled away, revealing through subtraction a poignant coming-of-age story and a razor-sharp dissection of gender and class relations set in late-1980s Ontario. Unlike much of the ‘work writing’ popular at that time, Mockler’s single stanza texts, solid as the cans of corn her narrator pushes down the line, transcend the story of their production, allowing for overtones many of us will recognize from our own teenage years. Wise, honest, familiar and insightful, this is a book I will read more than once.”
Michael Turner, author of Hard Core Logo and The Pornographer’s Poem

Tightrope Books, 2011