Bringing to life a snapshot of early North American urbanization, Lawren Harris’ modernist poetry and urban paintings are featured together for the first time in this unique historical journey. Including previously unpublished poems, this compendium offers a new view of his artistic period preceding the Group of Seven and presents an exciting window into Canadian urban space at the turn of the century. The juxtaposed poetry and paintings compliment each other to provide a unique view into the artistic workings as Harris confronted Toronto's cold underbelly—searching for a metaphor for the poverty that he encountered in the Ward's world.

Lawren Harris is a painter and a member of Canada's artistic group, the Group of Seven. Gregory Betts is an assistant professor at Brock University, where he teaches Canadian and avant-garde literature. He is the editor of After Exile: A Raymond Knister Poetry Reader, the acting editor of PRECIPICe literary magazine, and the author of Haikube and If Language. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Lawren Harris' profile page

GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts and response-text writing. If Language presents paragraph-length anagrams that explore the formation of meaning within a recombinant linguistic system. Haikube was part of a collaborative art project with sculptors Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel in which six of Betts's poems were carved into an ebony movable (a la Rubiks) cube. The text was carved in negative relief, which allowed the cube to function as a press block to print new poems as they were 'discovered' by moving the sides of the cube. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.

Gregory Betts' profile page