Butt out, Dante. Move over, Milton. Piss off, Pound. Outta the way, Olson. Here comes Cosmographia—a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, the latest ground breaking incursion into the ever popular spectacle of the Epic Poem. Tracking the classic epic journey through the unfolding cosmos toward home, though occasionally disoriented by milling cows with similar intent, Cosmographia teems with nasty political invective, scurrilous spiritual slander, and endless exploitive sexual innuendo. Taking as its muses Cab Calloway and Charles Mingus, by the time it gets home, Cosmographia has subjected the epic to unspeakable acts in the name of linguistic rectumtude, dada terrorism, and sporadic ejaculations of self-expression. Oh yeah!--poetry will never be the same.

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"Also a GG finalist in 2011, Cosmographia: a Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic definitely lives up to its full title, & more. It’s post-modern, post-war, post-philosophy, definitely post-lyric, hoping for post-capitalism/consumerism while knowing that’s not to be, & very much something of an epic gone postal. Michael Boughn erects a tottering tower of words, up the stairs of which both he & we can only slip & slide trying to maintain balance & not fall.

"Cosmographia’s almost flammable rhetoric, its huge excesses, sing of epic’s failure to do more than signal & point to the wounds in our world, our civilization (if we still give it that title). An index, then of social & political abuse, yet also a comedy of errors & the eros that stands against such painful reality. Boughn is a master of both high & low culture as both his many allusions & feckless footnotes declare. These invite each reader to bring her specific knowledge to bear upon the fluid & highly indeterminate cantos of this book-long poem. Undecidability is its mantra; & that begins on the Contents page, with various ‘Book’ titles out of whack. Thus each reader will find a particular way through the maze of this ‘faux micro-epic."

—’Eclectic Ruckus

Cosmographia, “this celestial romp, with its poems called Joys of Gravy, Freedom Fries and Hoochy Koochy Equivocations, never completely escapes (if you’ll forgive the pun) the force of gravitas, and it manages to be both “mock” and “epic” at the same time.”

—Paul Vermeerch, Globe and Mail

from the Afterword:

H.D. has been a significant figure in my imagination since 1968 when Robin Blaser first lent me his copies of the Oxford University Press edition of the three long poems that became known as Trilogy. I promptly photocopied them and bound them in rice paper covers. It was the beginning of a life-long tuition. The poems in Hermetic Divagations take up that relationship through an eccentric and obtuse tracking of H.D.’s Hermetic Definition. Each poem mirrors the form of its analog in H.D,’s book, having the same number of lines and stanzas. That constitutes a material connection that opens a relationship that is neither homage nor conversation nor explication nor history, but is all those things and more – a kind of grateful thinking brought to attention through her words.

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Michael Boughn’s Hermetic Divigations is a luminous book of gratitude and persistence. Boughn weaves H.D.’s traditions, motifs and words in his own poised lines, examining a resonant image hoard—flame, angel, amber, lotus, worm, and owl, and thereupon continually re-discovering female figures emanating poise, eros and blessing amid confusion and depredation. “Then she is there” is a repeated realization. The work is at once a poetics of rumination evoking immanent presence and a meditation on the acts of war and rancor that harass grace.  Hermetic Divigations is a serious and lucid reworking of questions of civilization where “dung and myrrh // mingle with air and fear,” yet where one persists in seeking the “hidden entrance in a world // of restricted visibility.”

—Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Michael Boughn’s “divagation” to and from HD’s Hermetic Definition wanders into the present, depth-charging its obdurate frigidity with a lexicon mystical, sensual, and mythographic.  HD declared “hermetic definition” as poetic method; and less homage than alignment, Boughn’s “grateful thinking” brings some of HD’s genius, and much of his own, to this luminous text.

—Sharon Thesen

Michael Boughn fuses visionary apperception with mature reflection

 to mercuriate socio-politically through “flesh disguised as fact”,

inside the sometime inspecific fruitions of living .. sfumato,

then vividly twists into it a generous undertow of love. Wonderful!

—Lissa Wolsak

Northrop Frye said "This is NOT great literature."

But any book with a poem about a beer bottle, "Stubbies", is aiming for a piece of my heart.

Michael Boughn is attempting to rewrite Canadian history in his image and does a pretty amusing job of it.

In Great Canadian Poems For The Aged Vol.1 Illus. Ed. Boughn takes on Nelson Eddy, Jeanette MacDonald, Doukhobors, Wawa, Ontario and Wyndham Lewis (to name but a few) with fairly traditional four line stanzas.  The form is fairly standard but Michael Boughn brings a curious twist indeed -- the unbridled play of his vivid imagination that gives full voice and definition to his new vision of the Great White North.

"The Mad Trapper of Rat River" makes an appearance with Jimmy Stewart and Boughn doesn't blink, but sets them both a place at his marvellous feast.

Boughn colours outside the edges whenever the need arises and constantly surprises with the breadth of his wit.  These poems come on hard, they have sharp edges and I'm sure it is on purpose.  Michael Boughn's poems move forward with unapologetic determination, consistent in their direction, yet it is the comedy that wins over the reader.

This is an illustrated book and as advertised there are pictures that appear as headings for a number of the poems.  A nice complimentary party trick but these poems work on their own.

—Michael Dennis

Great Canadian Poems for the Aged, Vol. 1 is a collection of twenty poems that plays with “the fundamental elements of the Canadian struggle for identity,” composing tongue-in-cheek poems on what was considered a deeply-held (predominantly late 19th and early 20th century) Canadianism, one that feels nearly antiquated now, more than a century later. . . . A self-aware collection of references, Boughn uses these bits of information as jumping-off points, utilizing fragments once so strong in the label of “Canadian identity” that have fallen by the wayside, or simply become outdated, irrelevant or simply forgotten. Utilized as triggers, he composes thick and playfully-dense, fully compact language poems relaying masses of information, making the play itself the purpose and the point. In an energized language, Boughn plays with “Doukhobor Butts,” “Foster Hewitt goes to heaven,” “Stubbies,” “Wyndham Lewis goes to Wawa,” and “Johnny Canuck and Miss Canada go to Wonderland,” the first sections of which read:

If it was as simple as the Queen

on a stamp the glaciers would be

just an embellished disclaimer.

The other side of the mountains

however, exclaim later plenitudes

till glacial restitution circulates

freely among elk herds by the side

of a road that never gets there

because toward ends it.

—rob mclennan

“Michael Boughn’s City is explicit in its celebration of the urban as a pumping heart with architecture. Boughn approaches the ‘common’ with an open language knowing full well that some who share the space may not ‘understand.’ His Walden is a full-canopied forest of neighbourhoods within and around which true solace is found, but only after much searching.”

— Victor Coleman

“City mirrors the soul’s own anthems, landmarks, apparitions and traffic jams. William Blake would be at home in Michael Boughn’s tough and devilish town, apocalyptic in its ferocious litanies and bellicose arsenals, its grinding insistent engine roar ruling out nothing, in the midst of which an ironic I, both innocent and experienced, detects a gently scented boudoir, green and hilly resolutions. City hums/with a sudden inoperable thrill, and even at the end of the world, songs pour / out someone’s hidden window.”

— Billie Chernicoff

 “City profiles el dorado’s detritus, those ‘scattered shapes that suggest themselves’ in bullet-like periodicity as we try to make sense of our desire for a shining city. Mike Boughn’s method in chronicling the ‘emerging pathogens of imaginable substance’ is to riff relentlessly, measuring the multiple traffic of the cities’ words and their possibly unattainable story. The poetic narration in this series operates as a kind of cloaking device, surprising our assumptions with its anti-spatiality from ‘those mouths at the edge of the sky.’ This ‘poem from the end of the world’ is an intense and provocative call ‘to give shape to the earth.’”

— Fred Wah

“What City Book One: Singular Assumptions demonstrates throughout its sharply observed & playful construction is one reply to the accusation that poetry doesn’t, & can’t, matter. We know how bad things are, in the largest political sense, in our cities, our states, & poetry, however cleverly it articulates the ‘atonal breaches in the historical / fabric.’ The wit of the whole, & comic intensity of, especially, ‘Part Three; Entertainment,’ suggest the ways in which poetry can shake up minds too easily & lazily given to reading the world (& its many means of communication) with an aggressiveness that remains trapped in political passivity. City argues, finally, that beauty & art are part of the possible solution, the book’s ‘adieu calls / to attention, to here, that supple / shift of weight yields the world // in spades. Anyway it’s a place to start.’”

-- Douglas Barbour, Eclectic Ruckus