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.