Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009

By Steve McCaffery

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781554582983

Steve McCaffery

Author of around 40 books of poetry and criticism published variously in Canada, England, and the United States, McCaffery was a founding member of the sound poetry ensemble Four Horsemen (with bpNichol of TRG—The Toronto Research Group), and a founding theorist of Language Poetry. He has published three previous titles with BookThug: a revised second edition of Panopticon, The Basho Variations, and Every Way Oakly (homolinguistic translations of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons), as well as editing the first Canadian edition of Stein's book of that name. He is the two-time recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing, and was shortlisted twice for the Governor General's Award in Poetry. He lives and teaches in Buffalo, NY, where he is the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University at Buffalo.

Book preview

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