The Obvious Flap

Barwin, Gary; Betts, Gregory

ISBN 10: 1897388780 / ISBN 13: 9781897388785

Published by BookThug, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2011

About this Item

Like new with light wear to covers and no marks to text. Poetry; 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾".

Seller Inventory # 80948

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Obvious Flap
• Publisher: BookThug, Toronto, ON, Canada
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1897388780
• ISBN 13: 9781897388785
• Binding: Softcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

what if the rain
referred to something else?
and bowling
and shoes
were done with the mouth?

Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas.

The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language's luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland.

not everyone is a poet
my dog for instance.

About the Author

GARY BARWIN is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist and the author of thirty five books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel Yiddish for Pirates was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction. Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy was chosen for Hamilton Reads, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature for Fiction. The winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ Life Membership Award, he has been twice shortlisted for their Spoken Word Award. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist, and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts, and response-text writing. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.