SongBu®st by Stephen Bett

Breaking into song, or breaking it apart? Maybe a bit of both. Simultaneously a celebration & a send up of iconic pop culture lyrics. SongBu®st is a book-length serial poem that plays like a metafiction anchored on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of infrathin, & featuring characters, or rather figures, recurring & reframing themselves throughout.

Stephen Bett’s new book SongBu®st sounds like a ship-wrecked wit (“We are coast people”) riffing at the end of the world. Here you’ll find snippets of old American pop songs morphed into takes on gun carnage and quotes from tech bros, each separated from the other by an “infrathin delay.” I’ve sometimes wondered what I would see (hear) if my actual life flashed before my eyes when I died. It might be a lot like this.

—Rae Armantrout (Pulitzer Prize winning poet)

These SongBu®st poems are quicksilver, mercurial, reJoycean. You get whisked away and the ride is full of surprises, dark trouble and elation all at the same bumpy time. I get the music, the rhythms as they disintegrate. In fact I’m jarred by all the songs and melded songs in play here. The concept “Infrathin,” too, is so fascinating and black holish that I’m already moving / pulled into a call to engagement with these poems. The footnotes are a blast, as well: I’m caught by them and what that space (allusion, explanation, fishook) is and does. The poems, above all, are smart and sassy. They are fabulous, and the collection as a whole is greater than its parts.

—Michael Kenyon (ReLit Award winning poet/novelist)

What I began to realize, reading these sinuous poems from SongBu®st a second time through, is the musicality of the pieces. There is a syncopated energy, a forward drive that is very appealing. I have to say, they sparkle!

—Ken Cathers (author of Missing Pieces and Letters From the Old Country)

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet. His earlier work is known for its sassy, edgy, hip… caustic wit―indeed, for the askance look of the serious satirist… skewering what he calls the ‘vapid monoculture’ of our times. His more recent books have been called an incredible accomplishment for their authentic minimalist subtlety. Many are tightly sequenced book-length ‘serial’ poems, which allow for a rich echoing of cadence and image, building a wonderfully subtle, nuanced music.

Bett follows in the avant tradition of Don Allen’s New American Poets. Hence the mandate for Simon Fraser University’s “Contemporary Literature Collection” to purchase and archive his “personal papers” for scholarly use.

He is recently retired after a 31-year teaching career largely at Langara College in Vancouver, and now lives with his wife Katie in Victoria, BC.

His website is StephenBett.com

Book Information:

· Paperback: 104 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-476-5

$18

Pre-Orders Welcome

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