The Globe and Mail Notes the "Real Domination" of Jay MillAr's BookThug

"Not since Coach House Press first published the likes of Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje more than 40 years ago has a single publisher of poetry made such an impression on the national literature," writes Canada's The Globe and Mail about "upstart small press" BookThug, which is "operated on a kitchen table almost single-handedly by Toronto poet Jay MillAr." Remarking on the fact that BookThug has published three of the five books up for the country's 2011 Governor-General’s poetry award (that's a state-sponsored $25,000, sigh), writer John Barber continues:

But when it comes to real domination, none of the authors or publishers vying for the big prizes can match the obscure one-man shop that virtually owns the shortlist for the 2011 Governor-General’s poetry award. . . .

...Fifty-three publishers, most of them surviving on modest grants from the Canada Council, submitted a total of 170 books for the 2011 poetry award.

The unifying theme of the three BookThug nominees is their diversity, according to MillAr, whose unconventional signature honours the legacy of such pioneer avant-gardists as bpNichol and bill bissett, publisher of blewointment press, the original inspiration for BookThug.

BookThug’s nominated titles “are three completely different books,” says the publisher, clean-cut and dressed in a checked shirt with belted trousers, looking more like the semi-suburban hockey dad he is than his mentor bill bissett, whom he remembers “wearing gigantic orange sunglasses and shaking a maraca” while reading. The three nominees’ diversity is exactly what he was hoping to achieve when he first established the imprint in 2004, MillAr says, hoping to bring together the vigorously warring ghettos of the early 21st-century scene.

“The poetry community is very small and it’s so ideologically driven,” he says. “You ended up having all these camps. It was almost like high school. But there was no real dialogue happening.”

Phil Hall’s Killdeer “comes from a lyrical-confessional background,” MillAr says. Michael Boughn’s Cosmographia, subtitled A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic, is “quite a hefty tome, with all of the workings of an epic – but in a micro way.” Kate Eichhorn’s Fieldnotes, a Forensic “is like CSI for really smart, interesting people, taking that forensic anthropology and plugging it through poetry and pornography and all kinds of strange things wrapped up together.”

Also nominated for the poetry award are Susan Musgrave’s Origami Dove, published by McClelland & Stewart; and Discovery Passages by Garry Thomas Morse, published by Talonbooks.

MillAr launched BookThug as “a response unit to Canadian literature,” its mission “to create a dialogue between experimental writers and people interested in more traditional forms of poetry.”

The new press boasted it was “the future of literature” – a claim no longer as presumptuous as it might once have seemed before this fall’s hat trick of nominations. Almost by accident along the way, BookThug began publishing Danish literature in translation, and is now North America’s premier source of such work, according to MillAr.

BookThug also publishes poetry by U.S. residents, including recent work from Steven Zultanski and Cara Benson.