Written with four hands, by Tom Prime and the Giller Prize and Governor General's Award shortlisted Gary Barwin, Bird Arsonist is avant-garde, tragicomic poetry at its most arresting.They say that the language of birds is the closest to that of the divine. They also say that poetry is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. In Bird Arsonist, Tom Prime and Gary Barwin―like all good avant-gardists―flip these commonplaces on their heads, showing that poetry sets alight any transparent, easy, lawful language, or is precisely what language spits out as it turns to ash.Compressed to the point of implosion, the poems that make up this volume are contorted descendants of Dadaism, Surrealism, and every other -ism. Prime and Barwin confront poetry's contemporary preference for confession and today's digitization of reality not only by―as they are two―using a doubled “I,” but also by letting language elide the human-all-too-human hand of authorship as such. The author of Bird Arsonist is language tout court, sonorous and fragmentary. Prime and Barwin have merely done the job of giving it the room to speak, of keeping it infected, of making visible the outline of its splinters and its cuts. Shake gently! "The warbling birdsong is subjected to the arsonist’s arsenal of strikethrough, smudge, x-ray, spellcheck, bracketing, encoding, and scission, but keeps reappearing in the contracted field as an unwieldy target, alongside other OOOOntological apparitions. Barwin and Prime’s “ultrathin pantomime” of mangled and botched experimental and algorithmic procedures force a sinthomatic reposition of the split, doubled, and dueling subject onto the austere and unforgiving page without seeking forgiveness, catharsis, or repose. This is, paradoxically, a relief and release from all pernicious forms of preciousness: a hyperbolic and convoluted sigh or gasp of unexpected delight." ― Felix Bernstein, artist, author, and cultural critic"Whether they are 'babies soft as guns' or 'hadron-stippled politicians' every reader will find their fetish nearing 'plumed apotheosis' within this turbulent twin-penned bird-bloodbath. Shout once you 'seed the ligneous bellows' of Barwin & Prime's I."― Jonathan Ball, author of The Lightning of Possible Storms
Used availability for Gary Barwin's Bird Arsonist