Joe Bishop is the author of the chapbook Dissociative Songs. His work has appeared in literary journals across Canada and abroad. He has a BA in English from Memorial University. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Indie Rock candidly focuses on a queer poet/musician's life in Newfoundland and his personal struggles with addiction, OCD, and trauma. This intelligent and punchy collection is steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. With an astute attention to form, rhythm, and aesthetics, Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story about an artist alienated from, but fascinated by, the world he inhabits. Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse. At its core, Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist's compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.
Sales Tips:
- Indie Rock is a lively new collection from a writer at the start of a strong literary career: a rhythmically savvy, modern, and unafraid queer voice.
- Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story of a poet/musician from Newfoundland who is an addict struggling to stay clean while coping with a mental illness, a queer man often at odds with his slippery sexuality and torn apart by past traumas. He examines hookup culture quite openly, while also noting the dangers of sexual exploration and genderfluidity in towns bound by rigid religious codes and toxic masculinity.
- The poet discusses relationships with both men and women, life with another musician who commits suicide, struggles with mental health and OCD, and the Newfoundland landscape and culture.
- Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist's compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.
- In the book, we witness a transformation of the bravado of Al Purdy into the raw honesty of Billy-Ray Belcourt. We see a translation of the delicacies of John Barton into the brutalities of early works by Michael Ondaatje.
- It's a punchy and intelligent collection steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland.
- Indie Rock strikingly straddles a variety of divides and binaries and perceived divisions in the CanLit poetry landscape, all in productive ways. The book's poetics, for instance, mix traditional lyric free-verse with the sonic density common in many contemporary books. The text also uses narrative techniques, vernacular voices, and observational description. Similarly, the book engages Newfoundland as a regional site.
>Audience:
- Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse.
- A contemporary readership interested in queer identity and sexuality; the struggles between addiction and faith; or discussions of OCD, suicide, grief, and the nature of imagination, will find this collection intriguing.
- The book will certainly have a strong East Coast readership, due to the explorations of landscape and Newfoundland cadence and slang in the poems.