"Written with four hands, by Tom Prime and the Giller Prize and Governor General's Award shortlisted Gary Barwin, Bird Arsonist is avant-garde, tragicomic poetry at its most arresting. They say the language of birds is the closest to that of the divine. They also say poetry is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. In Bird Arsonist, Tom Prime and Gary Barwin -- like all good avant-gardists -- flip these commonplaces on their heads, showing that poetry sets alight any transparent, easy, lawful language, or is precisely what language spits out as it turns to ash. Compressed to the point of implosion, the poems that make up this volume are contorted descendants of Dadaism, Surrealism, and every other -ism."-- Provided by publisher