Poetry. "Greg Betts is writing anagrams. Is his project zany? You bet it is"—Christian Bök. Containing 56 paragraph-long perfect anagrams of an original seed-text, Gregory Betts's IF LANGUAGE takes a one-time parlor game to its evolutionary extreme. Each poem is exactly 525 letters. The book asks: what are the limits of individuality within a closed system? Betts explores this question with humor, intellect, and with a manic obsession capable of turning a simple game into this wildly original exploration. "If language is an economy, then Gregory Betts's IF LANGUAGE skips the boom and the bust and revels in the echo"—erek beaulieu.

Gregory Betts is a poet, editor, essayist, and teacher originally from Vancouver and Toronto. He is the author of If Language (Book Thug 2005), Haikube (2006), as well as seven chapbooks and various bits of ephemera. His first published poem was an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, appearing in the anthology TTbpN2 (1999). Betts' work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, and response-text writing. His first chapbook, All You Need to Know (House Press 2000), "plundered" poems from Toronto's Yellow Pages. His most recent chapbooks, including The Curse of Canada (above/ground Press 2008) and The Others Raised in Me (Trainwreck Press 2008), "plunder" poems from acknowledged single authors to create new works (see the "plunderverse" manifesto for more). His essays, poems, stories, and manifestos have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, the United States, and four other countries.