For the better part of a decade, Hollywood Hospital was the site of more than 6000 supervised LSD trips. Under the care of psychiatrist J. Ross MacLean and researcher/ex-spy Al “Captain Trips” Hubbard, it was the only medical facility in BC (and one of a handful across the country) venturing into the brave new world of psychedelic psychiatry — from a specialized inner sanctum known as the Acid Room.

Influenced by the dark edginess of Southern Gothic literature but set in 1984 to the music of Tina Turner, Madonna, and Stevie Nicks, After We Drowned ties together themes of environmental crisis and poverty, noting that it is poor people who often bear the brunt of ecological disaster. This is a coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America.

Against Death: 35 Essay On Living articulates the personal experiences of each author’s “near-deathness,” utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what “magical thinking” proposes.

In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself.

Asking for Directions is a happy hour of poetry, blurring the lines between straight-up realism, goofy weirdness, linear narrative, dreamscape, lovestruck awe, wonder, and joy.

Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to shut Rosenberg up once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn’t always tragic, but it’s often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound.

Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid.

Bolt, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over familiar and unknown landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from twenty years as a welder with the Boilermakers’ Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, Bolt investigates rough terrain and long horizons.

Raw, violent, and at times absurd, Borderline treats all things — the city, class, education, mental health, despair, sexuality, love, and art, with an unflinching, unblinking regard.