Shannon Bramer (The Refrigerator Memory), Stephen Cain (American Standard / Canada Dry) and Sherwin Tjia (The World is a Heartbreaker) read at Pharmacie Esperanza with Corey Frost, author of The Worthwhile Flux (Conundrum Press) and Genevieve McClean. Music by Amber Goodwyn.

The World Is a Heartbreaker inaugurates a new subgenre: imposter poetry. This collection is a set of 1600 pseudohaikus, bite-sized chunks of poetic goodness shotgunned at the distracted masses. What’s a pseudohaiku? It’s the poetry of pure indulgence, a three-liner without the constraint, the pretension or the 5–7–5 syllable form. The subject matter? Relationships, cats, insecurities – themes recur and build into a kind of non-linear narrative. These micropoems are easily digestible yet remarkably acute, a catalogue of scattered thoughts and pointed observations that go down like potato chips – betcha can’t read just one. Sometimes sexy, sometimes scandalous, sometimes sentimental, but always three lines long, these pseudohaikus are the future of poetry in a world awash with sound bites, news clips, catchphrases. There are no pleasures like the guilty ones.

Sherwin Tjia is a Montreal-based poet and painter. He has exhibited widely and works as a medical illustrator for McGill University. He is the author of “Pedigree Girls” (comic strips) and “Gentle Fictions” (poetry), both from Insomniac. Recently, he illustrated JonArno Lawson’s “The Man in the Moon-Fixer’s Mask” (Pedlar). A second “Pedigree Girls” collection will be published by UK-based Saqi Books in spring 2005.