It's been 150 years since Alice first entered Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's beloved classic book. My, how times have changed! Now, from the multi-award-winning poet and scholar Steve McCaffery comes Alice in Plunderland, a reimagining of Lewis Carroll's Alice books that will forever change the way readers negotiate Wonderland and its menagerie of characters.
McCaffery is your tour guide to Plunderland, a rough-and-tumble world where theft, drugs, and gangs hold sway, and nary a tea party is to be found. Meet the Cheshire Cat (a junkie from the UK), and just try to keep your head on as the King and Queen reign over the land of Cocaine. Yes, in this remarkable land of drug addiction, looting, and civil disobedience, even Alice's adventures are transformed in her quest for a fix.
Clelia Scala's translated collages beautifully annotate McCaffery's renewed vision of Wonderland. Just as McCaffery has plundered Carroll's original text, Scala uses John Tenniel's iconic artwork to create a new look for the world of Alice's Plunderland.
Fans of McCaffery's work will find plenty of poetic marvel to sink their teeth into. In this, his first foray into prose-parody, McCaffery's innovative poetics (in tandem with Scala's provoking images in full colour) transform this classic story according to McCaffery's theory of "palindromic time" by which the past is contemporized and the present historicized. Alice in Plunderland is sure to break open an exciting new initiative for fans of experimental writing and linguistics in the years to come.

Steve McCaffery was born January 24, 1947, in Sheffield, England. He came to Canada partly to work with bpNichol, and the two poets formed the Toronto Research Group. McCaffery and Nichol also combined talents with Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera as the Four Horsemen, creating and performing innovative sound poetry. McCaffery attended both the University of Hull and York University. During the seventies and eighties, he and Nichol were regular contributors to the poetic journal Open Letter. McCaffery's collection of critical writings, North of Intention, stands as one of the earliest and best collections of essays about experimental writing in Canada and the U.S., and it demonstrates and explores McCaffery's own affiliation with the practitioners of the so-called Language Poetry and poetics, often considered a uniquely American phenomenon. McCaffery has twice been nominated for a Governor General's award for poetry, and now holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo (Amherst).

Steve McCaffery's profile page

Clelia Scala's profile page