Description
22 Skiddo takes as its playground the junkyard of Modernity. In a contemporary world which discards memory and experience along with last season's shoes, any building over 25 years old, and millions of tons of last years' computers and cell phones, these poems recycle archeologically recovered materials into a funny, lively exploration of the possibilities of creation in a world where the young think that what Duke Ellington made wasn't really music.
If 22 Skiddo reclaims the junk of modern culture, finding for it new forms and arrangements, SubTractions kicks the props from under the elaborate illusion of completion that ironically locates a world without history. Beginning with Gilles Deleuze's proposal that the only role for 1 in our contemporary experience is as -1, destabilizing whatever arrangements of thought that try to seize and secure the ground of their own composition, these poems move through the daily experience of kid's soccer games, orchestra practice, karate lessons, and mushroom infestations, vandalizing the usual and leaving behind the shattered languages of its beautiful wreckage struggling toward speech.
About the author
Michael Boughn worked in the Teamsters for nearly 10 years before returning to university to earn a PhD in 1986 after studying with poets John Clarke and Robert Creeley. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Iterations of the Diagonal, Dislocations in Crystal, 22 Skidoo / SubTractions, Cosmographia – a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic (short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2011), and most recently, Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol. 1 Illus. Ed. (BookThug, 2012). He has also published books for young adults, including the Maple Award nominated Into the World of the Dead, a mystery novel, and a descriptive bibliography of the American poet, H.D. He recently edited (with Victor Coleman) Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book for the University of California Press. He has also published numerous articles on film, writing, architecture and music, most recently "The War on Art and Zero Dark Thirty" in CineAction. He has taught courses at the University of Toronto since 1993, recently focusing primarily on American writing with special emphasis on the innovative writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
