22 Skidoo 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 year’s 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 Skidoo 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.

Michael Boughn is a hockey father who lives in Toronto with his wife, Elizabeth, and children, Amelia and Sam. His previous books include: Iterations of the Diagonal (1995), A little post-apocalyptic suite for RC with thanks for the rhino (1996), Dislocation Flutter (1998), One’s own MIND (1999), and Dislocations in Crystal (2003). He is currently editing (with Victor Coleman) Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book for publication at the University of California Press.

96 pages; 6x9 inches; paperback
ISBN 1 897388 34 9 | 978 1 897388 34 1
April 2009