Busted is a poetic inspection into the rhetoric of things: governance, nation, hockey, language and liberty. A book of poems about the social forces that control us, and the way that we relate to those forces, and to each other. Through manifestos, fragments, lists, and other forms, this book examines the ways in which we knuckle under to the Powers that Be and the strategies that we develop to evade them. Razing the frames that still the possibilities of reason, nations, identity, morality and justice, it records, fragments and rails against the flaccid generic.

This collaboration between two excellent, innovative writers is a kind of collage that examines the role that language plays in establishing relationships between ourselves and the institutions we create to govern us. A dazzling and revolutionary work that demands we never stop singing for liberty.

Nancy Shaw was an award-winning poet, scholar, art critic, and curator. Author of Affordable Tedium (1991) and Scoptocratic (1992), Shaw frequently collaborated with poet Catriona Strang, with whom she also co-authored two books of poetry: Busted (2001) and Cold Trip (2006). Shaw received a Ph.D. in communications from McGill University in 2000 and held a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Modern Art, Media Pedagogy, Cultural Citizenship: The Museum of Modern Art’s Television Project, 1952–1955,” was judged as a superior work. Just prior to her death in 2007, she was engaged in new research on McLuhan and the visual arts. During the 1980s in Vancouver, she was at the centre of interdisciplinary collaborations, contributing as a writer, artist, curator, and critic.

Nancy Shaw's profile page

A founding member of the Institute for Domestic Research, Catriona Strang is the author of Low Fancy, Corked, Reveries of a Solitary Biker, and Unfuckable Lardass and co-author of Busted, Cold Trip, and Light Sweet Crude with the late Nancy Shaw, whose selected works, The Gorge, she edited.She frequently collaborates with composer Jacqueline Leggatt, and lives with her two grown kids on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Lands.

Catriona Strang's profile page