Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries offers a collection of nineteen essays that deftly erodes the simplistic distinction between modernism and postmodernism, showing that many attributes of postmodernist verse form not a break with, but rather a continuation of, modernist poetry.

The stimulating mix of academics and practising poets that have contributed to this volume provides an unusual and illuminating integration of critical and creative practice and a vibrantly diverse approach to questions of poetry and sexuality. Each section of essays is complemented by poems which creatively illustrate or develop the theme with which the essays critically engage. Rather than being limited to a specific genre, tradition, time or place, this collection seeks to make a virtue of contrast, comparison and juxtaposition. The collection is arranged into sections that range broadly across the thematic ground of dichotomies, traditions and revisions, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, women and embodiment, and the notion of play and performance. Positioning eighteenth-century tinkers ballads alongside medieval Hebrew lyrics and the Blues of Gorgeous Puddin’, or making Dionysus rub shoulders with Sharon Olds and Mrs Rochester provides new perspectives on familiar material and valuable insights into more obscure work and the nature of sensual poetry as a mode of expression. As the editors suggest, the essays and poems presented collectively argue that writings about sexuality are always already about the way poets see and represent our bodies, the world and poetic language itself.

Using a critical examination of the collage poetics of Ronald Johnson, this book sets out to understand Johnson's poetry in the context of the "New American" collage tradition, stretching from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky and beyond. Additionally, the book assesses Johnson's work in relation to wider questions concerning literary chronologies, especially the discontinuities commonly seen to exist between nineteenth-century Romantic and twentieth-century modernist literary forms.

Widely admired as one of Canada's leading philosophers, Francis Sparshott is a major figure in postwar philosophical aesthetics. In this book he presents an annotated version of the text of the four 1996 Ryle Lectures that he gave at Trent University. Addressing the nature and prospects of aesthetics as a discipline, Sparshott discusses beauty, taste, and the place of imagination, fiction, and fine art in societies. He investigates the place of such a discipline in the broad social structures provided by universities and civilizations, and tackles many perennially interesting questions about education and the life of the mind. Written with wit and charm, the lectures journey through a vast terrain of references, yet wear their learning lightly. Sparshott's engaging style and humane vision will, as always, attract a wide and diverse readership.