"For thirty-five years Gary Barwin has been opening up new ways of being in poetry. In this long-awaited new and selected collection, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe, Barwin and his editor, Alessandro Porco, have drawn from his extensive writings in previously published books, chapbooks, small press works, magazine and journal publications, including unpublishing and uncollected works to create this category-defying book. Over the course of the collection Barwin uses a variety of forms and styles to explore themes from aesthetic investigations to questions of identity and culture, from ecopoetics to questions of language. Throughout Barwin stretches language to its fullest extent, whether he's exploring alternative translations or working with images as poems; he continually moves readers from surprise to delight."--

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language.

In Outside the Hat lies a landscape of CanaDada and SurRielism, populated by dancing medieval woodcuts, Franglais--speaking dogs, sadistic provincial politicians and melodious bison. Including work culled from a plethora of micro-press chapbooks such as Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog , The Irridescent Phlegm of Bagpipers Glorious with Flu and The Stars Are a Pale Pox on the Sky's Dark Chicken , this is the definitive Gary Barwin collection: stranger than you (can) think.

In the pages of Gary Barwin's latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world. Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us - that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of "nature" and "the animal." As philosophical as it is entertaining - weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more - No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.

"Written with four hands, by Tom Prime and the Giller Prize and Governor General's Award shortlisted Gary Barwin, Bird Arsonist is avant-garde, tragicomic poetry at its most arresting. They say the language of birds is the closest to that of the divine. They also say poetry is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. In Bird Arsonist, Tom Prime and Gary Barwin -- like all good avant-gardists -- flip these commonplaces on their heads, showing that poetry sets alight any transparent, easy, lawful language, or is precisely what language spits out as it turns to ash. Compressed to the point of implosion, the poems that make up this volume are contorted descendants of Dadaism, Surrealism, and every other -ism."--

what if the rain referred to something else? and bowling and shoes were done with the mouth? Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas. The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language's luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland. not everyone is a poet my dog for instance.

Gary Barwin and derek beaulieu's seamless collaboration has resulted in frogments from the frag pool: haiku after Basho . This collection of poetry mixes joy with rigour, playfulness with contemplation, and the absurd with pure poetic passion. Barwin and beaulieu have created poetry that is wise, witty, and wry. Filled with translations, responses, remixes, and new takes on Matsuo Basho's famous frog haiku, frogments from the frag pool exuberantly ripples genre,expectation,and meaning. Prepare to be splashed by this pool!