Announcing the long-awaited reprint of Steve McCaffery's rare 1984 intervention into fiction (if "fiction" indeed this be). Taking its inspiration from Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon Papers" McCaffery's Panopticon shatters all omnivison in a tour de force of formal innovation, theoretical comment and narrative critique. In Panopticon narrative stutters, repeats itself, sequence is deranged and complicated by a multi-media presence on the page of grids, film bands and acoustic channels. On its first appearance Charles Bernstein hailed the book as "as perhaps the exemplary �antiabsorptive work'" and William McPheron claimed its first appearance as "an extraordinary act of revolution and charity. Out of print for over twenty-five years, this new edition is enhanced by the inclusion of a revised CD recording of the book, its three voices, one male, two female teasing out the gender complexities of Panopticon. McCaffery has also added an Introduction to the book and has revised the text entirely.

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).

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