Barfly
A CBC Books Best Poetry Book of 2024 • A CBC Books Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title
We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.
In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.
Michael Lista. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.
More books by author
