Sonosyntactics introduces the reader to over forty-five years of Paul Dutton's diverse and inventive poetry, ranging from lyrics, prose poems, and visual work to performance texts and scores. Perhaps best known for his acclaimed solo sound performances and his contributions to the iconic sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, Dutton is a surprising, witty, sensitive, and innovative explorer of language and of the human. This volume gathers a representative selection of his most significant and characteristic poetry together with a generous selection of uncollected new work. Sonosyntactics demonstrates Dutton's willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities while at the same time engaging with his perennial concerns - love, sex, music, time, thought, humour, the materiality of language, and poetry itself. Gary Barwin's introduction outlines the major subjects and techniques of Dutton's poetry: an intricate weaving of thought and language, sound and emotion, sound and sense, and the unfolding of a text through the logic of language play such as puns, paradoxes, ambiguity, and sound relations. In an afterword by Dutton himself, the poet insightfully lays out the terms of his engagement with the materiality - both visual and aural - of language, often beyond the purely recountable, representational, or depictive.

Winner of the 2011 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the "Utne Reader" has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' "The Porcupinity of the Stars" sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin's trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention."

The surrealist antics of Gary Barwin will run the predictability of your universe through a particle accelerator. Watch as your right eyebrow turns into you as a child. Watch Jeff connect the mower to the Internet to cut other people's lawns. Hear the sploosh as Barwin drops some extra syllables in Basho's frog pond.

Funny, smart and as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, "Raising Eyebrows" is divided into four mind-boggling sections - dirty dogs, my life in the salad spinner, ukiah poems: frogments from the frag pond, and bassoon throng blues. "Raising Eyebrows" will make you do just that.