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In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsbury's Versions of North attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avantgarde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification. Lainsbury borrows from a wide variety of sources, filtering them through the grid of a disenchanted idealism taking to heart the cyberpunk declaration that "information wants to be free."
Lainsbury uses the page as physical space: a long line creeps into the margin, and margins float about without justification reflecting a desire to mix and confuse games, to play many simultaneously, to use the vice of poetry to pay homage to the virtue of science. He exploits a phantasmagorical lexicon that aggregates literary, philosophical and scientific avant-gardism, and challenges the reader to participate in the construction of a provisional space for effect.
Versions of North engages with the environment of Northern British Columbia; it is the manifestation of the poet's desire to create a cosmopolitan art in a place that modernity sometimes seems to have skipped right over.
