This is a good biography and piece of cultural history, but for several reasons I found it a depressing read. The survival strategies of an avant-garde poet reduced to writing scripts for Canadian kiddie TV are simply not that uplifting. Accounts of infighting among the members of a dippy psycho-therapeutic commune (Therafields) are not much more inspiring. And the specimens of bpNichol's writing given here are frankly disappointing, and project a "You kind of had to be there" vibe. When a writer does not come across as particularly talented in his own biography, a sympathetic one at that, well that's telling. ( )