Winner, ReLit Award (Poetry) 

Winner, Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award 

Winner, John V. Hicks Award 

Shortlisted, Brenda MacDonald Riches First Book Award

“Tysdal at his best creates a complex, multidimensional, and often contradictory layering of thought and feeling; this tremendously rich, inventive, and energetic book is a most auspicious debut.” —Malcolm Woodland, “Letters in Canada 2006: Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly​

An energetic, funny, and experimental first poetry manuscript which takes emotional as well as formal risks. Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method acknowledges the dangers of the technological age, with a combination of irreverence and reverence for technology and pop culture. From the poem, “Zombies, a Catalogue of their Return” to the piece “Missing,” Tysdal leads us in and out of the cyber labyrinth while simultaneously criticizing and lampooning it. To do so, he also makes great use of the visual aspect of reading. He redefines the page to suit his interests and concerns. Work that is this inventive is often undisciplined, but this is not the case here—these pieces are very carefully crafted. But this manuscript is not just about the cyber age. It also encompasses more traditional plagues—there are poems about AIDS, death and loss, about terror, about being and nothingness. There is real tenderness too, and depths of feeling and insight unusual in a work with such formalist concerns. Although an overall sense of narrative loneliness and isolation underpins and anchors the electron storms that drive the structural inventiveness, the boundaries of poetry in Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method have a wonderful cyber-kinetic elasticity that is a great pleasure for the dedicated reader.