In a series of brief, finely etched lines, Conal Smiley’s “thoughts / that accompany the void” are filled with Scriabin, shattering glass, the voices of God and Satan, family memories, Swann’s Way, Simone Weil, hammers and glaciers. From A Blue Room we hear resound a beautiful and brave new poetic voice.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 24 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-1-7383154-2-0

Published December 2024.

Price: $15 + $2.55 S/H

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“I dug until I could dig no longer,” writes Line Dufour in this, the third of our “One Poet/One Poem” series. Spade Work offers a meditation on digging, its purposes and its methods, while warning of the perils one might encounter in undertaking it. The work to be done is, clearly, on oneself and may end, as the poem ends, in tears. A spare and measured delineation of strata both physical and mental, Spade Work is an impressive début.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 16 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-7383154-1-3

Published December 2024.

Price: $10 + $1.70 S/H

I used to tell people I was a crack baby. It's not exactly true but it's not entirely untrue either. They'd blink at me in shock, raise an eyebrow slowly like "sorry, what?" Or they'd laugh. I always liked the ones who laughed, the more the better. If nothing else, I've always been an entertainer ...

5.5 x 8.5 in., 12 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-9992166-8-9

Published October 2023.

Price: $12 + $2.04 S/H

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I was ripping up the kitchen floor. It was the spring of 1997 and I was hellbent on finding beneath decades of linoleum the solid hardwood that had to be there. On my knees, prying up one brittle layer after another from the iron grip of tar-like glue, my mind filled with the memory of my father on his knees scrubbing our kitchen floor. As a boy he had done this for his mother, for Gracie, and he continued to do it for my mother ...

5.5 x 8.5 in., 20 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-7383154-0-6

Published April 2024.

Price: $12 + $2.04 S/H

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It all began at Sneaky Dee's, in the basement dark, not quite twenty years ago. Art Bergmann was on the stage, strung out on - what? Heroin? Maybe he'd inhaled a thermos full of helium. The music was a loud roar in the narrow space. Joe did not know it yet, but his ears would ring for not one, not two, but three years ...

5.5 x 8.5 in., 32 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-9992166-9-6

Published October 2023.

Price: $12 + $2.04 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

A triptych in which factual details and excerpts from recordings are interwoven, allowing the reader to join the astronauts Neil, Mike, and Buzz inside Eagle and Columbia as they contemplate the beginning and end of their mission

The second in our series “One Poet/One Poem.”

6 x 9 in., 12 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-9992166-6-5

Published October 2022.

Price: $10 + $1.70 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

In the sunlit room they say that grief is love, a scribbled note is a grenade to the heart, and the bag must be packed. Andrew Crabtree's second chapbook is beautiful, harrowing, tumultuous, and gloriously alive.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 44 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-9992166-7-2

Published, August 2023, in an edition of 100 numbered copies.

Reprinted, February 2024, in an edition of 50 copies.

Price: $15 + $2.55 S/H

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“fury, fury, fury, grief.”

A mother rocks a sick child, funeral crows float like smoke in the sky, secrets are kept from loved ones, and the past follows us like a hungry ghost in these intimate and haunting lyrics.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 24 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-1-9992166-3-4

Published, October 2021, in an edition of 100 numbered copies.

[Sold out]

An anthology of new work by espresso authors.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 32 pages, saddle stitched

ISBN 978-1-9992166-2-7

Published August 2020.

Price: $10 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

the corpus undone in the blizzard chronicles a journey of illness and recovery, yet its course moves beyond the halls of medicine. Never without touches of humour and irony, the poems investigate relationships between the body and its articulation of memory, between voice and its absence, and the complex intersections of hunger, the feminine, and language.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 32 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-1-9992166-0-3

Published, February 2020, in an edition of 100 numbered copies.

Price: $15 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

A linked suite of poems about growing up that is also a reaching-out to the community of prairie poets. Its tough and tender language explores sexual politics, gender identity, and how we make meaning.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 28 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-0-9866214-9-9

Published, June 2019, in an edition of 100 numbered copies.

Price: $15 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

A flash mob of ants. Maple saplings growing up through an abandoned car. A landscape haunted by what is neither ghost nor spirit nor angel.

In this suite of eighteen exquisite poems, Don Domanski contemplates our place in the natural world with an agnosticism bordering on faith.

Don Domanski was born and raised in Cape Breton. The author of nine books of poetry, he was a recipient of the Governor General's Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and the Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award.

His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, Portuguese, Arabic, and Chinese.


4.75 x 8.5 in., 28 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-0-9866214-2-0

Published, May 2015, in an edition of 150 numbered copies.

Price: $12 + $2 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

Poems invested in exploring, and infused with, negative affect—affect which is political in the sense that it circles around various stinks arising from the world. Taking a hint from the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, who meddled with the structure of language to unsettle the cultural logics embedded within it, Helberg abides by an eldritch (private? spontaneous?) syntax. Following sound more than sense, or following sound into alternative sense-making, she produces enigmatical moodscapes for a reader’s wandering.

5.5 x 8.5 in., 36 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-1-9992166-1-0

Published, May 2021, in an edition of 100 numbered copies.

Price: $15 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

Black thoughts, wistful regrets, and wise-ass jokes — Jon Cone's new chapbook of poetry gives us a middle-aged writer facing his own mortality, a poetic whistling in the dark.

Yesterday I was like young.
It didn’t seem peculiar to anyone.
The ordinary is a blue cup leaking by a white plate.
It rains. I wander interstate
the inkless vein that fuels.
I think it would be nice to leave this room.

Jon Cone grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with his wife and two cats. His most recent collection is Least (Greying Ghost).

4.75 x 8.5 in., 32 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-0-9866214-7-5

Published, November 2017, in an edition of 75 numbered copies.

Price: $12 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

In these nine brief essays the young author-to-be learns that he is only the fourth-funniest in his class, sees a dead body, contemplates artistic failure, goes fishing, and tips over in a chair.

“In the winter our street became as dreary as a Russian landscape. So one December my parents took us to Miami Beach. The hotel was enormous, with vaulted ceilings and huge tables covered in glass bowls brimming with exotic blooms. When my brothers and I weren’t roaming the corridors we were out on the private beach of creamy sand, building complicated castles and moat systems. We took breaks only to swim, or rather play, in the ocean, diving into the oncoming waves and feeling the tug of the undertow that wanted to keep us down forever ...”

Cary Fagan is the author of six novels and three story collections, including A Bird's Eye, My Life Among the Apes, and Valentine's Fall. He has also published many books for children.

Illustrated by Sophie Fagan

5.5 by 7 in., 36 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-0-9866214-5-1

Published, September 2016, in an edition of 150 numbered copies.

Price: $12 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

From the afterword:

“Each of the 8th and 9th century Tang poems I selected for this collection opens a moment of stillness in a situation of loss, hesitation, sea change.

“My own translations might be called free improvisations; or variations upon a latticework of themes; or experiments in rearranged prismatic perspective, as though each poem were viewed from three distinct vantage points. The original Chinese poems knead the rhythms of silence into line and verse, and frequently they obscure the position of the speaker to favour fragments of landscape. Certain variations transmit these absences, sometimes with such devotion to the task that they dissolve nearly as soon as they begin; other variations fill the emptiness up with my own experience of the original poem, and take on gradients of melancholia, disorientation, obsession. The forms of my variations condense or expand, withdraw or explode, carry the original’s spirit faithfully across or wilfully extend that spirit’s intent.”

6.5 by 6.5 in., 36 pages, hand sewn and bound, with french flaps

ISBN 978-0-9866214-4-4

Published, June 2016, in an edition of 150 numbered copies.

Price: $12 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.

Introducing “One Poet/One Poem,” our new series of short, affordable, attractive chapbooks.

In I regret everything, JonArno Lawson makes a memorable addition to the category of list poems:

I regret that I slept through the storm,
and also that I got swept away from the surface
when all was calm beneath. 

Whether it’s music, pointless Novembers, or giving the wrong people a second chance, our disconsolate poet indeed regrets just about everything. Why, then, is his poem so energizing and possibly even funny?

JonArno Lawson is the author of many books for adults and children, including The Hobo’s Crowbar, Uncle Holland, Enjoy it While it Hurts, and Sidewalk Flowers. He lives in Toronto.

4.25 by 6.75 in., 24 pages, stapled

ISBN 978-0-9866214-6-8

Published, February 2017, in an edition of 150 copies.

Price: $5 + $2.55 S/H

To purchase a copy, click on the button above.