ABOUT THIS BOOK

• Shortlisted for the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award!

Gangson is about aesthetics and culture, both personal and impersonal. It’s about language and politics, and the politics of language.

Gangson is also about violence. Violence shapes societies and places. Violence writes histories, defines movements, and constructs meanings. In the series of poems at the heart of this collection, Were the Bees author Andy Weaver examines how aggression and manipulation are as equally responsible as politics and language for how societies come to be defined.

Employing experimental techniques such as cut-ups and chance-generated poetry and drawing inspiration from the classic turn-of-the-century criminal study, Gangs of New York, Gangson presents a new way of thinking about the politics of survival and the bestial nature of man.