The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing

The Kootenay School of Writing is an internationally renowned poetry group that came of age in the 1980s. It is best known for its contributions to language poetry, the tradition founded in the early 1970s by Charles Bernstein and others, a direct descendant of the "New American" poetry movement. Using the psychoanalytic criticism of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žizek, novelist and poet Burnham unpacks and demystifies the purposely dense and disjunctive work of KSW poets, arguing that it matter...