Psychic Geographies is a tour de force, an ambitious exploration of the age, its physical and emotional permutations, its tragic contradictions, its joyful transformations. Gregory Betts takes a construct from the Situationists of the last Century as a means of exploring the language and rhetoric of the contemporary global moment as symptomatic of stasis and psychosis. How he does this is what sets Psychic Geographies apart, what makes this a book without precedent in Canadian letters.

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