It's been 150 years since Alice first entered Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's beloved classic book. My, how times have changed! Now, from the multi-award-winning poet and scholar Steve McCaffery comes Alice in Plunderland, a reimagining of Lewis Carroll's Alice books that will forever change the way readers negotiate Wonderland and its menagerie of characters.

Written as part of a larger project called Chiasmus, in which McCaffery will "queer the classics," Plunderland's Alice and all of the other characters become infused with qualities related to the notion of "plunder"—theft, drug addiction, looting and civil disorder. Instilled with humour, intelligence, and more than a little bit of absurdity, this retelling of Alice’s adventures takes place somewhere other than expected. In the rough-and-tumble world of Plunderland, where theft, drugs, and gangs hold sway, and nary a tea party is to be found, the Cheshire Cat is a junky from the UK; the King and Queen hold court over the land of Cocaine; even Alice's adventures are transformed in her quest for a fix.

As the result of McCaffery's theory of "palindromic time" by which the past is contemporized and the present historicized, fans of McCaffery’s work will find plenty of poetic marvel to sink their teeth into. In Alice in Plunderland, his first foray into prose-parody, McCaffery's innovative poetics transform a classic story, and in doing so, break open an exciting new initiative for fans of experimental poetics and linguistics in the years to come.

Steve McCaffery was born January 24, 1947, in Sheffield, England. He came to Canada partly to work with bpNichol, and the two poets formed the Toronto Research Group. McCaffery and Nichol also combined talents with Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera as the Four Horsemen, creating and performing innovative sound poetry. McCaffery attended both the University of Hull and York University. During the seventies and eighties, he and Nichol were regular contributors to the poetic journal Open Letter. McCaffery's collection of critical writings, North of Intention, stands as one of the earliest and best collections of essays about experimental writing in Canada and the U.S., and it demonstrates and explores McCaffery's own affiliation with the practitioners of the so-called Language Poetry and poetics, often considered a uniquely American phenomenon. McCaffery has twice been nominated for a Governor General's award for poetry, and now holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo (Amherst).

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