Praise for Barfly

“The language is punchy, it can be raunchy, benefits from being read aloud, and when you do, like a Hole song, it’s full of bravado and vulnerability.”
—Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

“Exquisitely raw and vulnerable.”
—Tara Henley, Lean Out

“After a ten-year hiatus from poetry—and out of nowhere—Michael Lista has dropped an instant classic. The poems in this book are profane, pugilistic, and moving, with wickedly funny rhymes to boot. Barfly is an uncompromising, messed-up masterpiece. I fucking love it.”
—Jason Guriel, author of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles

“Like supremely eloquent graffiti written on the wall of a magnificent palace, except the palace is the world, and the world is on fire.”
—Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure

Praise for Michael Lista

“Provocative and profound but eminently readable, Strike Anywhere demonstrates a critic of high order, unrestrained. It’s great fun watching Lista play with matches.”
—Foreword Reviews

“There aren’t many Canadian books of poetry that are anticipated with quite so much excitement as Michael Lista’s debut, which has been the talk of the town for some time. But the book outpaces the expectations even of those kindly disposed to it.”
—Quill and Quire

“Bloom is all one might hope for in a book of poetry: an unencumbered, nervy fusion of imagination and form.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Lista has here brought together potent ingredients, at once harmonious and dissonant, in a container with metal enough to withstand blasts from poems being split apart and reincarnated.”
—Globe and Mail

“A brilliant, erudite new voice.”
—Montreal Gazette