It’s here! Our two new book launches are available in paperback from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk; in Kindle Stores worldwide and on Smashwords. It’s all part of a scheme to revitalize a form of poetry that entranced early Renaissance European courts… the glosa.

Further details are  on the web pages for the books: Dead Edit Redo: A novella of Horror and Good Medicine and Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas.

Join in on Twitter: #bringingbacktheglosa

These books are amazing, but to explain in a sentence doesn’t do them justice. The best way to enjoy the books is to read both in succession (in any order; that’s the circularity for you). Here’s a taster from the press release…

Anglo-Canadian campaign launches to revitalize the poetry of the Troubadours

Canadian heteronymic professor publishes collection of ‘glosa’ poetry and stars in horror novella as part of the #bringingbacktheglosa campaign.

Bromham, Bedfordshire, UK: Greyhart Press, a publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and thriller books, announces its latest book releases are:

Dead Edit Redo, a literary-horror novella in which the main character is Canadian Alain C. Dexter, heteronymic professor of poetry at Brougham College.

Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas a collection of poems written by the ‘real’ Alain C. Dexter in the glosa style, a vibrant and brief form of poetry popular with the romantic heartthrobs of medieval Europe: the troubadours.

Except… don’t look for Alain C. Dexter in the ranks of academia because Alain is the creation of Canadian writer Elaine Stirling. More than a penname, literary heteronyms are fully fledged characters developed by their creators to allow them to write in different styles and express themselves through different personas. Just listen to the two chatting away on Twitter to realize how different they are!

Stirling developed Alain C. Dexter as part of the #bringingbacktheglosa campaign to popularize the glosa form, a form of short poetry that takes a series of lines (a crown stanza) from another poet and ‘talks’ to the original by beginning each stanza of the glosa with a line from the crown stanza. The glosa form inspired Canadian poet P.K. Page to write the seminal Hologram, a collection of glosas, in 1994. Page inspired Stirling, who created Dexter, who in turn found inspirational crown stanzas not just from poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but also in the philosophical writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. It is not for nothing that the collection is entitled a circularity of glosas.

In a simultaneous book launch comes Dead Edit Redo, a novella in which Alain C. Dexter stars as a troubled poet haunted by his experience many years earlier when he left the land of the living and experienced a ‘third’ place — neither life not death — where the glosas of Dead to Rights were created. First Nations good medicine is Dexter’s only hope, but does he want to return?

Asked to describe glosas, Alain C. Deter explained, “Glosas deliver like a compact short story, in stereo; they’re a poetic high energy drink, a double shot espresso of verse. You can read one glosa and read it again several times to experience a kaleidoscope effect of something new with each reread. Or you can take in a whole wallop of them and begin to sense the underlying structure that gives the glosa its . . . well, glisten.”

Commenting on the release, Greyhart Press publisher Tim C. Taylor said: “Reading the twin manuscripts for Dead Edit Redo and Dead to Rights was an experience I’ll never forget, and I read a lot of scripts in my profession. Ideas loop around and over and collide and bind with the real and the unreal. It’s a madcap experience.”

Dead to Rights: a Circularity of Glosas by Alain C. Dexter is published March 14th by Greyhart Press in paperback (ISBN  978-1909636019, pp74,  $7.50 ) from retailers such as amazon.com and as an eBook from retailers such as amazon.com ($2.99)

Dead Edit Redo by Elaine Stirling is published March 14th by Greyhart Press in paperback (ISBN  978-1909636026, pp108,  $7.50 ) from retailers such as amazon.com and as an eBook from retailers such as amazon.com ($2.99)

Notes to editors

Elaine Stirling has been a “professional” writer since 1985, by virtue of having sold the first of ten Harlequin romances in that year. Five of those were romantic suspense because she loves a good mystery as much as a good love story. In subsequent years, while attempting to write a godawfully serious and tragic historical nonentity, she sold short fiction to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Fantasy and Science Fiction. To keep food on the table, she became a corporate communication consultant and ended up quite enjoying that too. Her first nonfiction book, The Corporate Storyteller: A Writing Manual & Style Guide for the Brave New Business Leader, was published in 2009.

Learn more about Elaine Stirling at her website www.elainestirling.wordpress.com

Alain C. Dexter is a professor of poetry at Brougham College and best-selling, heteronymic author of the award-winning Gizzard’s Luck & Other Organic Festivities, a collection of short stories; and the poetry collection, Poems from the Soles of his Feet. Dexter enjoys imported beer, hiking in the great Canadian north woods, and hobnobbing with the rich and famous. He appears as himself in Elaine Stirling’s novella of horror and good medicine, Dead Edit Redo, and lives on the north shore of Lake Superior. Chat with him on Twitter @AlainCDexter

Bedfordshire-based Greyhart Press was set up in 2011 by author Tim C. Taylor to publish his back catalogue. Within days, other authors were asking to be published through Greyhart, and Taylor put his writing on hold to run Greyhart Press full-time. To date, Greyhart Press has published 38 books by 17 authors.www.greyhartpress.com    www.ataleforatale.com

Follow the campaign on Twitter #bringingbacktheglosa