The Ubiquitous Big

You’ve heard of The Big Sleep, right? Well, it’s sixty years later and time for The Ubiquitous Big. This book, the second from Calgary poet Ian Samuels, explores the language of certain influential aspects of early to mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Yes, folks, you get Arcana, based on the cultural fascination with war drawn from a kaleidoscope of incidental sources and overheard conversations; Personality, a take on the fashion cycle accessed through an old cosmetology textbook; and The Ubiquitous Big, which takes on cinema and gender through a scrambled, augmented and mythologized series of quotes from classic film noir. The result is a playful and humorous book of poetry with a serious trigger finger. So shut up, get in the car, and sit back for a romp through some of the funniest language to pass through time and expose the myth of its own mythos.