Poetry. The poems in Michael Boughn's fourth collection find their genesis in medieval prince Henry the Navigator's epoch-shifting naval campaign to establish trade with West Africa. They pick through the vague terrain of history and culture, seeking a glimpse of unanticipated forms and disparate knowledge, only to find the promised land to be 'not of the given but the taken.' Crossing and recrossing untold regions disguised as a New World, these carefully crafted lyric poems, in the tradition of Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, scatter the seeds of the yet-to-be-thought, drawing readers onward toward a dream that lies past apocalypse.

Author City: Toronto, ON CAN

Born and raised in Riverside, California, Michael Boughn moved to Canada in 1966 because of his opposition to the war against Viet Nam. In Vancouver he met and studied with Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Charles Olson, H.D., Jack Spicer, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and other crucial writers. He spent nearly 10 years working in the Teamsters before returning to school to study with Robert Creeley and Jack Clarke in Buffalo, N.Y. where he received his PhD in 1986. Since 1993 he has lived in Toronto. He is the author of Iterations of the Diagonal, DISLOCATIONS IN CRYSTAL, Into the World of the Dead, One's own Mind, 22 SKIDOO/SUBTRACTIONS, and COSMOGRAPHIA: A POST-LUCRECIAN FAUX MICRO-EPIC. With Victor Coleman, he edited Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book for the University of California Press. His detective novel, Business As Usual, is forthcoming.