Louise Bak's first major collection of poetry is an event of the first order. Ranging widely from extreme intensity to breathy ethereality, these poems challenge the reader's preconceptions about race, culture, sexuality and language in equal measure. Bak's liberal spicing of her sometimes startling uses of english argot put her poetry at the forefront of feminist discourse in a series of texts that are at once confrontational and conciliatory. The 98 pages of text are accompanied by a 12 page glossary. The book also includes artwork by Eli Langer, Justin Cheung and Ho Tam. The online version of Gingko Kitchen will appear in the first week of July.

1-55245-008-2 perfectbound, 120pp $35 first limited edition

Louise Bak's writing is laser-sharp in its vivisection of our diseased dominator society. At once clinical and erotic, violent and serene, her work exposes the cultural psyche with cool poetic audacity. Viscerally, alchemically, and subversively beautiful - in the right hands, these poems could be very dangerous.
- Steve Venright

A progressive poetry of ecstatic opposition - timelessly present, simply complex, gushingly dry, mouthwateringly intellectual, coolly passionate, chastely libidinal and satanically innocent. One could do worse."
- David W. McFadden

spectacular louise bak grew up in kingston shuttering moonlit nothingness under kingston trees n cawing her way into classrooms evidently accumulating a detached relation in language which allows her to shine in an aesthetic estuary rarely evidenced in kingston. she came to Toronto when seventeen encountering all manner of cumulus n trees thru many imp-robable worlds she arrays as an eliding background to language play & paints with a related ny/paris grecian urn paradise. in september of 2007 she will be chairing the meetings on reappropriating art as sexual and spiritual ela tion for the city state which now reaches Thunder Bay down through Ohio. in 2014 operating mainly from her self-created yacht in the Mediterrainian, she will link the dreams of the sea and the dreams of the earth. that these fateful developments are already articulable is owing to her discovery in the year 9030 C of a means of communicating via tonal variations in the human voice a relation to time as stunning as the species earlier magic w language.
- John Barlow

Louise Bak was born in Kingston, Ontario and has lived in Toronto since 1991. She works actively as a writer, editor, radio broadcaster, performance artist and sexuality counsellor. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies in North America. Her first book of poetry, emeighty, was published in a limited edition by Letters Bookshop in 1995. She is currently the guest art editor of the feminist culture magazine PlusZero. Aside from her literary (in)ventures, Louise can be heard every Tuesday morning as co-host of Sex City, Toronto's only morning program dedicated to ongoing cultural (s)excavation (CIUT-FM 89.5). Her performance work has appeared recently in the independent films Cheese (1995), Amidst Us (Total Eclipse Productions, 1996) and The Wall (1997). She is co-originator of SLANT, Canada's first television magazine to explore Canadian-Asian art and culture, now in development. She is also completing her graduate work on the transperformative aspects of Cantonese opera in Canada at the University of Toronto.