Butterfly Tongue

Butterfly Tongue is Richard-Yves Sitoski's spoken word fringe show, and his final legacy project as Poet Laureate. It is a simple tale about a down-on-his-luck welder and his muse, a "finger-painted Mona Lisa" cursed with an angel's wings.

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The book also includes the texts of three other plays: the surrealism of Airborne, the suburban grit of Why Did You Come Here?, and the slapstick farce of The Beholder of the Eye.

No Sleep ‘til Eden

An augmented reality book of poetry that includes multimedia visual art, animation and video and audio clips accessible through a free online browser developed by KP9 Interactive.

Do you grieve with elephants? Would you like to set up a tortoise on a blind date? Have you ever sat down on a driftwood log and taken out a bottleneck slide to sing the blues with piping plovers in the dark of a new moon? Yes? Then this book is for you.

“He says more in … two lines than many people might manage in a thousand…. I read this book twice with great delight.” – John B. Lee, in Verse Afire

Wait, What?

Wait, What? is the 2nd place winner of the 2022 Don Gutteridge Award for a full-length poetry manuscript. It's a harrowing, humorous and surreal trip into a psych ward and out the other side.   

As Charlie Petch says, "Richard-Yves Sitoski ... lets us know he's here for the joke, the truth, and the message. No words are wasted getting to the themes of absurdity and futility. These poems have the reader thrown into a Dali-esque landscape anchored by meaning and self-effacing humour. These poems are little logic whiplashes. With just a few words, Sitoski will leave you in another dimension wondering how you got there so quickly, and deeply."

Downmarket Oldies FM Station Blues

These are poems for those who would sneak up on Janus, who would swim lakes colder than space untraversed by elementary particles, who would crawl sandblasted toward an oasis in a desert of love, who would cling to life like a rain-soaked sheet.

A poem is not a mirror

but a stone in hand

ready

to be flung at one

How to Be Human

How to Be Human was published as part of the 2021 John Newlove Award, granted for "Air Kiss", which appeared in Bywords.ca and about which contest judge Elee Kraljii Gardiner said, "This poem cleaned my smeared glasses and straightened my collar."

Is this chapbook a study guide? Or merely the interrogations of the perpetually confused? On this question, at least, the jury will be perpetually out. 

brownfields: Poems

Brownfields are contaminated lots that dot the landscape from coast to coast, emblems of our post-industrial society. They are at once more and less than derelict space: unsuited for development without costly remediation, many will lie fallow forever, rebuking us with a silence that is not the charged quiet of nature but the emptiness of human loss.

These brownfields serve as the dominant metaphor in this poetic “autogeography” of Owen Sound as its spaces, peoples and institutions transform over an arc of time extending from the geologic past through fin-de-siècle irony to turn of the millennium confusion. Equal parts lament and encomium, brownfields is a chronicle of Owen Sound both as a particular place and as an example of many a small Canadian city struggling to renew itself and find footing in a globalized world.

“The poems are personal and ruminative, precise and reflective.” –Andrew Armitage, in the Owen Sound Sun Times