Table of Contents
Notes
Order & Tip
Online Books
Letters
CHBooks
Typeset in ITC Cheltenham Bold and Corona and printed at Coach House Printing on bpNichol Lane, 1998.
Editor for the Press: Darren Wershler-Henry.
Orthography and punctuation in FIT TO PRINT reproduce actual differences between Canadian and UK English usage. All mistales are deliferate.
Book design by Darren Wershler-Henry and Stan Bevington.
Web design by damian lopes.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alan Halsey's books include Perspectives On The Reach (1981), Five Years Out (1989), Reasonable Distance (1992), The Text of Shelley's Death (1995) and A Robin Hood Book (1996). He was born in London, England in 1949, and now lives in Sheffield.Karen Mac Cormack was born in Luanshya, Zambia in 1956. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Straw Cupid (1987), Quirks & Quillets (1991), Marine Snow (1995), and The Tongue Moves Talk (1997). Of dual British/Canadian citizenship, she lives in Toronto.
ISBN 1-55245-987-X
Coach House Books, 1998
NEW BOOK BY ALAN HALSEY, KAREN MAC CORMACK
TORONTO -
Coach House Books and West House Books today announced the online publication of FIT TO PRINT. It is written by British poet and artist Alan Halsey and Canadian poet Karen Mac Cormack.
This is the first collaboration by these two reknowned poets. The poems are modelled on that most quotidian of reading materials - the newspaper. The writing itself displays a concern with daily events, and news factual and quasi-factual, emphasizing their information overload. Structured on patterns of meaning that foreground linguistic materiality, these poems negotiate the newspaper format to enact a fusion of mass culture with an innovative writing practice.
FIT TO PRINT is published in Canada by Coach House Books. It is simultaneously published in Britain by West House Books. The online edition is part of the dynamic Coach House Books website.
CRITICS HAIL FIT TO PRINT
I can think of no better counterblast to the Murdochising of communications than a daily dose of Halsey and Mac Cormack (unless, perhaps, it were Aaron Williamson and Geraldine Monk providing the commentary and expert analysis on the World Cup). Their risk-syndicated columns brim with pertinence and they don't pull no punches either. I have no hesitation and neither have they.- Ken Edwards
It was Marshall McLuhan who pointed to the fact that to read a newspaper is to experience Cubism in the everyday world. What FIT TO PRINT offers is a revivification of an avant-garde format eroded by quotidian habit. Columns and disjunction come alive again in a landmark book of transatlantic collaboration in which poems are assemblages, millennial merz carved from Fleet Street rhizospheres. What news would be if news could desire and escape along lines of flight.
- Steve McCaffery
In this transatlantic collaboration of prodigious subtlety and relentless invention, Mac Cormack and Halsey delve into the geological strata of the English vernacular, from the British Isles of Romans and Normans to the multinational currency of supermarket aisles. News headlines and sales pitches, slogans and jargon fibrillate into nets of linguistic 'Glitch Trips', turning even small transmission mishaps into voltage spikes of significance. FIT TO PRINT brings you the latest intelligence as poetry is meant to: 'Every word has a sense of what's about to have happened.'
- Mary Margaret Sloan