Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Poetry General

Truth

A Book of Fictions

by (author) bp Nichol

Publisher
The Mercury Press
Initial publish date
Sep 1996
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780920544983
    Publish Date
    Sep 1996
    List Price
    $14.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Truth: A Book of Fictions takes reading through the looking-glass to haunt those linguistic frontiers where pun, paradox and contradiction reign supreme and to navigate the delirious other side of sense where language emerges as the obsessive object of both analysis and desire.
Truth: A Book of Fictions is a valuable addition to Nichol's oeuvre. Caringly edited by Irene Niechoda, its range encompasses studies in contradictory information, the book-machine, a "pataphysical hardware catalogue, allegories of the single letter and the alternate semiotics of cartoon clouds. Spanning more than twenty years? worth of rich material, it will be welcomed by logophiliacs and paradoxophiles alike. For as John Ruskin put it, when love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.

About the author

Wayne Clifford came to Grand Manan, New Brunswick as a permanent resident in 2007 after thirty-five years of college teaching. A former resident of Kingston, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia, he and his wife, M.J. Edwards, have built a house at Rocky Corner on the Whistle Road, where she practices as an artist, and he writes more or less full-time. Author of more than a dozen poetry books and chapbooks, Wayne is also an amateur musician, artist, and award-winning designer. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto, and an MA and MFA from the prestigious international Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, but appreciates that his adopted home has much to teach him.

bpNichol (Barrie Phillip Nichol) was born September 30, 1944 in Vancouver, British Columbia. His writing is, by definition, engaged with what he called "borderblur": in his lifetime he wrote (somewhere between) poetry, novels, short fiction, children's books, musical scores, comic book art, collage/assemblage, and computer texts. Nichol was also an inveterate collaborator, working with the sound poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen (whose members were Nichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery); Steve McCaffery as part of the Toronto Research Group (TRG); the visual artist Barbara Caruso; and countless other writers. In the mid 1980s bpNichol became a successful writer for the children's television show Fraggle Rock, produced by Jim Henson. His early work in sound was documented in Michael Ondaatje's film Sons of Captain Poetry. A second film has been made on Nichol, bp: pushing the boundaries, directed by Brian Nash; he also appears in Ron Mann's film Poetry in Motion. bpNichol died in Toronto, Ontario on September 25, 1988.

bp Nichol's profile page