Blaurock Press

With You the Moments of my Life are Fading:
In thirty-seven short movements of mixed verse, prose and dialogue, the poem chronicles the death of a love, and the ensuing struggles for understanding and dignity. A modern Psalm, an elegy or lamentation, it is steeped in the Bible, the ancient [...]

Molasses:
“My real name is Amanda Vrazda and I suppose I owe you a story.” Thus begins an extraordinary narrative. In passage after passage of virtuosic prose, from erotic fantasy to Bible thumping to John Donne, from urban Ontario to hillbilly Tennessee to French Quarter New Orleans, the metaphysical and [...]

Dahlia Boyz:
Colin and Dwight are on a mission to Los Angeles to find Uncle Skip, who is obsessed by the unsolved 1947 Black Dahlia murder. “She wasn’t some self-loathing skank who turned tricks for drugs and money,” Skip admonishes them, “She was Elizabeth Short. Born twenty-nine July in nineteen [...]

Like a road:
“My name is Jerry Carson.” And so it begins. All Carson men leave home early, and between departure and return, between flight and reconciliation lies the journey. Trial by water and by fire, trials of betrayal, imprisonment, loneliness and loss. As in all fairy tales there are [...]

The Yellow Room:
The final days of Jørgen Mikkelsen. A man of no family or property, a disappointed artist and lover, a reluctant Resistance fighter, a man with intolerable burdens of memory and regret. Alone with his thoughts, a curiously lucid madman imprisoned in an attic room, Jørgen conjures out [...]

Acquainted With Absence. Selected Poems:
“—a magnificent poet, prolific, protean and deeply, intensely, personal. She is a metaphysical poet, concerned with ends and existence, yet she grounds everything in the specific and the concrete. “Reading and rereading her, one begins to notice, beyond the narratives of [...]

Dry Bones:
A hybrid narrative, different voices, contrasting worlds. One strand—banal, cruel, funny, sentimental by turns—a coming-of-age tale, a middle-class schoolboy awakens to the facts of class and sex in post-war England. The other strand a sordid tale of manipulation, betrayal and murder in Toronto, Kingston and Montreal. These stories [...]

Philip Snowcroft’s Finality:
A Manhattan fable of talent and mediocrity, ambition and genius, art and commerce, crime and punishment. Owen Higdon, hungry artist’s-agent, likeable chancer and compulsive gambler, has staked everything on selling Philip Snowcroft’s new painting. Finality is his friend’s culminating achievement as an artist, a work of epic [...]

Made Up of Arias:
Lilla, Joey and Clara Pentangeli, their father Salvatore and their mercurial mother Seraphina live on Paradise Street behind a giant billboard, in a charmed world filled with operatic heroines. Seraphina idolizes Maria Callas. Between bouts of housework, she re-enacts Violetta’s death scene from La Traviata, dresses [...]

Swimming to Fatima:
A cycle of spare, sweet-sad, magical tales. A small girl dreams a house floating away. Lolly loves pink. Walter and Hank conduct a juke-box war. Tessie dances with a spectral Sidney Greenstreet. Sadie may or may not have caused Lila to be air-borne. Characters migrate between stories. [...]