From prolific Canadian writer George Bowering comes Horizontal Surfaces, the complete collection of long-form poetic criticism that extends his 2007 chapbook of the same name, and the latest addition to BookThug’s Department of Critical Thought.

Horizontal Surfaces came from the same atelier as earlier critical works, Craft Slices (1985) and Errata (1988). In it, Bowering offers philosophical musings on topics as wide-ranging as poetry’s accessibility and what that means for baseball (a favourite topic for the author), the solidity of Ezra Pound’s writing, and spirituality in the west.

In some ways, readers may see this as a telling of Bowering’s life to this point—a mid-life pseudo-memoir of sorts, after achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, poet, historian, Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, judge of major literary competitions… But this work does so much more: expressing the value and validity of language; how words have been important to Bowering, as useful tools to exact meaning; and at the same time, calling into question the utility of poetry to truly represent those things that our senses perceive to be “real.”

George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.

George Bowering's profile page

“Bowering’s poetic meditations weave together literature and criticism without indulging in abstract language or academic jargon.”— Canadian Literature