"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.

"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."--