Th Influenza Uv Logic

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

bill bissett has committed many words to paper in his career. This book
is packed with them. They are not well-chosen words—that would go
against bissett’s free-wheeling sense of himself as Bohemian bard. The
words have more-or-less phonetic spellings, which seem to have no
principle: Why write “qween” rather than “kween”? Is there a
good reason for spelling “to” and “too” as “2”? That hardly
seems phonetic.

In this book, bissett has been reading philosophy and there are
references to logik, Plato, and Sartre, but it is hard to detect real
ideas, much less logical relations among them. The poet has provided
some drawings, one of them suggestively phallic. It’s a shame he
hasn’t exploited his undeniable skill as a creator of visual poetry,
though a few poems have interesting typographical arrangements. A book
for bissett fans.