The Debaucher Launches

Who is the debaucher?
He is not a bad man.
He is, I'm sure, pure
with wild intention.

Come celebrate the launch of The Debaucher, my third collection of poetry. In blurb lingo:

This book walks an oscillating lyrical tightrope between realms of cosmopolitan sophistication and ribald hilarity. In these surprising poems high art and low art gather together, sometimes on the battlefield, sometimes at lover’s leap. Here “The Song of Roland” is re-imagined as a set of cartoon panels, debauchery is praised as a virtue, and a pair of cannibals dines on a poet. Through it all, Camlot’s poetry always maintains an evocative connection to the tender absurdities of our daily lives. He makes us laugh, nervously, at ourselves.

I'll be doing a few readings and launches in May and June for my new book.

MAY 21: I'll launch the book in TORONTO in a joint Punchy/Insomniac Launch, reading with Stuart Ross and Catherine Graham. TIME: 7:00 PM. VENUE: Dora Keogh Traditional Irish Pub, 141 Danforth Ave.

MAY 23: I'll be reading in BUFFALO with Stuart Ross, David McGimpsey and Andrea Strudensky. TIME: 7:30 PM. VENUE: Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street.



MAY 27: I'll be doing a solo launch and reading of my book in MONTREAL at the legendary Word Bookstore. TIME: 7:30 PM. VENUE: The Word Bookstore, 489 Milton Street.

JUNE 6: I’ll be reading in TORONTO again, at the I.V. LOUNGE with Alex Porco and Dominico Capilongo. TIME: 7:00 PM. VENUE: I.V. Lounge, 326 Dundas Street West.

Events That Just Happened

It has been a busy month, and will continue to be a busy one, well into the next one. On the first night (April 30th) of Blue Met this year, I read along with David McGimpsey, Susan Gillis, Endre Farkas, Caroline Marie Souaid and Josh Auerbach at the Soirée de Poesie I; and then, on the final afternoon, David and I launched the first two titles in the new imprint we are editing.
Here's the officialese dirt on the new imprint we call PUNCHY:

Punchy Writers Series is a new poetry & fiction imprint of DC Books edited by Jason Camlot and David McGimpsey. Punchy is committed to publishing formally engaging and thematically fun literature. Readers who pick up a book from the Punchy Writers Series will know that they are in for a challenging and pleasurable ride. If it's excellent and compelling, strange and fun, Punchy will get behind it. Punchy Writers Series fits nicely within the historical mission of DC Books to embody "a tradition of literary innovation, dissent against convention, and artistic facilitation that is second to none." Send queries to punchywriters@gmail.com



The first two awesome PUNCHY titles in the series are:

DEAD CARS IN MANAGUA
By Stuart Ross

Stuart Ross's sixth poetry collection is both an experimental departure for Ross and an offering of some of his most accurate surrealistic observations to date. Dead Cars in Managua gathers into one volume three discrete poetry projects—an absurdist Baedeker of image-driven prose poems about Managua accompanied by his original photos, a formally various sequence of personal, narrative poems about the claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals, and a selection of cubist and abstract poems where Ross shows his experimental New York School cards like never before. All of the poems in this book are touched by Ross's unique ability to dissolve our common-sense understanding of the world, and then distill a more potent truth from the remains of sense and reason.


SQUISHY
By Arjun Basu

Arjun Basu's fiction collection is a wry and provocative book which exloses the realities beneath social conventions. Squishy asks: Do you still love me? Do you want fries with that? Do I look fat? Life is full of small moments that define us, tangents that lead us to unexpected places, bad decisions and no decisions with repercussions you couldn't possibly predict. This is the world of Squishy—an aspiring actress fast approaching her best-before date, a world weary travel writer, a disgraced ballplayer suffering the lingering effects of a wardrobe malfunction—all characters aware of life's promise and impossibility, tempted by something just beyond, something surely delicious.