Bloody Jack

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

When Dennis Cooley published Bloody Jack for the first time in 1984, it
was one of the few postmodern narratives in Canadian poetry, and
commentators were often puzzled by its deconstructive playfulness. The
title refers to John Krafchenko—a kind of poor man’s John
Dillinger—who murdered a bank manager in Plum Coulee, Manitoba, in
1914. But Krafchenko is only a peg for verbal acrobatics and
self-reflexive shenanigans by the author, who is a quick draw with the
double entendre.

This handsome reissue has been revised and manages to take into account
some of the criticism of the first edition. Douglas Barbour provides a
succinct introduction to the methods of what he refers to as a “wacky
writer,” whose sidekicks include Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva.