Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, RATS NEST is a collection of short stories builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century.

This first full-length book by Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated by a self-reproducing 3D Printed Kid made especially for this purpose.

As the Kid descends the layers of a seemingly never-ending pit, its nightmares and hallucinations--recorded in stunning detail--unfold in twelve chilling sci-fi stories of unreality that will make readers think twice about what it means to be a human (or humanoid) on the planet we call home.

Sault Ste. Marie-born Mat Laporte is a writer and musician, and co-founder of the micro-press Ferno House. Laporte is the author of a tetralogy of chapbooks: Demons, Billboards from Hell, Life Savings (nominated for the 2013 bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Bad Infinity. His poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including Poetry is Dead, The Puritan, and the Lemon Hound blog. RATS NEST, Laporte's first full-length book, is forthcoming from BookThug in the fall of 2016.

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"RATS NEST is a fragmented and extended transmission from 'the world's first 3D Printed Kid.' It is a dissident, noir, cyberpunk diary that recalls the monotony of service/office labour and projects that struggle onto the failed tropes of 'what the future may hold.' Here, the future is a recursive failure of both affinity and empathy, launched from the outer reaches of a space-time where both identity and narrative are in flux. This is a work that simultaneously calls to mind Ovid's Metamorphosis and the prose of Philip K. Dick, both Alice Notley's Descent of Alette and the riotous 'cut-up' novels of Kathy Acker. Has Mat Laporte eaten our dreams? Are these texts the cognitive-enteric-cybernetic remnants of a necessarily alienated posthumanity? 'Bursting forth from the primordial/id itself ... a flickering/non-linear flood of fact and sensory data,' Laporte has engendered for us an austere and gorgeous horror." —Liz Howard, 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize winner for Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent