My Books
Nuala: a fable
Set in an atypical dystopian world, Nuala is startlingly original and inventive, echoing the work of Margaret Atwood, José Saramago, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Beach’s dark, fearless imagination has created a time and space that are at once remote and strange, but absorbing and deeply credible. Nuala leaves the reader with much to consider about the nature of love, possessiveness, jealousy, envy, and autonomy.
Shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction
University of Alberta Press
The Last Temptation of Bond
Kimmy Beach fuses popular culture and narrative poetry to astonishing effect in this, her fifth book. Feasting on the tropes, traps, and types of the James Bond mythos and doubling back on the incendiary narrative of Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, Beach and her cast of loved-and-left Bond Girls dismantle the man and his mysteries. Fans of Beach's tenacious poetry and readers seeking redemption in explosive narrative and fearless wit will love The Last Temptation of Bond.
Winner of the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence
in cars
As the speakers pound out instantly recognizable hits of the seventies, Beach looks under the hood of female desire. Hands at two and ten o'clock, she investigates our fascination with cars and the way they crash. Wearing her white Sure-Grip high-tops roller skates with Precision Bearing wheels, Kimmy Beach, the reigning poet of popular culture, pops the clutch at the intersection of libido and loss.
Standard features of in Cars include youthful lust and squealing tires, muscle cars and disco balls. Optional extras include style, smarts, and Fancy Ass jeans.
Fake Paul
As the unnamed narrator of Fake Paul scours every trace of the most boyish Beatle’s history in Liverpool and New York, Beach uncovers the poetic in dingy, sweating, underground bars, out-of-body concert experiences, and stolen wax museum heads. When Paul is found in the guise of a tribute band bassist, Beach explores those moments where obsession crosses over into possession, and love becomes an exercise in blind self-destruction.
Alarum Within: theatre poems
“Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
-Macbeth, Act I, Scene iv
A theatre audience sees only the drama and meaning of the performance on stage. The narrator of Kimmy Beach's second poetry collection, Alarum Within, has a different tale to tell—not only of backstage encounters with overwrought set designers and pushy stage mothers at a small college theatre, but of illness, addiction, and identity.
When the stage lights turn off, the drama doesn't stop.
Adapted for the stage by Erindale Theatre: U of T at Mississauga, The University of Toronto, and Red Deer College
Nice Day for Murder: Poems for James Cagney
A collection of poems for one of Hollywood’s great actors, Jimmy Cagney, best known for his gangster films of the 1930s. Nice Day for Murder takes a Tommy gun to contemporary notions of poetry and feminism.
In his gangster films, Jimmy Cagney mashes fruit into the face of his love interests, snaps wet towels at them, kicks the chair from under them and otherwise abuses them, and they always come back for more. Women take the fruit and the towels back in these poems, exploring the dangerous liberation and erotic appeal that violence can possess for women. Lines begin to blur between fiction and reality as the narrative confuses Cagney's street-tough persona with his gentle off-screen demeanour.
Inevitably, as in all the great movies, this romance ends in murder.