Winner of the 2011 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the "Utne Reader" has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' "The Porcupinity of the Stars" sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin's trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention."

The surrealist antics of Gary Barwin will run the predictability of your universe through a particle accelerator. Watch as your right eyebrow turns into you as a child. Watch Jeff connect the mower to the Internet to cut other people's lawns. Hear the sploosh as Barwin drops some extra syllables in Basho's frog pond.

Funny, smart and as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, "Raising Eyebrows" is divided into four mind-boggling sections - dirty dogs, my life in the salad spinner, ukiah poems: frogments from the frag pond, and bassoon throng blues. "Raising Eyebrows" will make you do just that.

Hide under your bed! "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret" meets "South Park" in "The Lillian Lectures," a collection of short poems and cheerfully nasty illustrations that will turn your universe on its head.

Remember how strange you thought sex and God were when you were little? Six-year-old Melanie is weirder and naughtier than you ever were, and now she's passing her wealth of wacky wisdom on to her little sister, Lillian. Your mom would never let you play with them, but you sure would have wanted to; Melanie is the ultimate bad influence.