Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems of the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

In two massive volumes, Steve McCaffery, Canada's most challenging, experimental and innovative poet/critic amasses the best of his previously published and ungathered work.

From the early concrete and visual poems of "Broken Mandala" and "Transitions to the Beast" to the Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired philosophical investigations of "EVOBA, " from the innovative novel "Panopticon" to the Governor General's Award-nominated "Theory of Sediment" and the recent "The Cheat of Words, " this comprehensive edition covers all phases of McCaffery's vast and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre. Many works that have previously only been available in small, privately circulated editions, such as "Shifters" and "Every Way Oakly, " are available in perfect-bound form here for the first time.

Volume 2, following in the wake of the extraordinarily successful first volume, collects the best of McCaffery's ungathered work. Along with selections from his concrete and visual poetry, this book contains sound poem and performance scores, excerpts from early chapbooks, 'pataphysical essays and sections of the often-discussed but rarely seen text "The Abstract Ruin." For new readers and long-time fans of McCaffery alike, Volume 2 of "Seven Pages Missing" is essential reading.

"Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989?2009" presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCaffery's major texts, including "The Black Debt," "Theory of Sediment," "The Cheat of Words," and "Slightly Left of Thinking," but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCaffery's poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCaffery's work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decades?this volume is essential reading.

Poetry. Translation. THE BASHO VARIATIONS gathers thirty-four translations of Basho's famous haiku. In doing so, it enters an august (albeit scanty) lineage of maverick redactions of this poem that include (as inaugural) the 'frog pond plop' by Dom Sylvester Huedard and the 'fog prondl pop' by bp Nichol. Inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, it also joins the company of his earlier 'Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (After Basho)' as well as the Frogments from the Frag Pool: Haiku after Basho by fellow ludicians de langage Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu; Beaulieu's solo ((plop)) and Basho's Frogger (a Zen video game) created by the Prize Budget for Boys.

This volume collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by a major figure in contemporary poetry -- one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and complex in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice -- to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical principles against which it must be read.

McCaffery approaches the poetic work as an occasion for philosophical reflection and discovery, reading works as diverse as Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, the Marquis de Sade's fiction, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary via Wittgenstein, and Jackson Mac Low's aleatory poetry to show how language actually behaves rather than how it is designed to function. Exploring a range of writing from seventeenth-century England to the avant-garde contemporary poetics of writers such as Robin Blaser and Karen MacCormack, these essays trace intersections along a broad conceptual plane that McCaffery terms the "protosemantic", demonstrating how a reader must examine the interstices of each text, its paragrammatic possibilities, its Deleuzean folds.