Lewis Carrol meets Allen Ginsberg.... This is poetry about an angel-poet, wings paper-clipped, seeking spiritual food in the modern office cubicle. He pecks away at office-machinery (à la Dilbert) and dreams among his fellow stick men and women of being a Wordsworthian visionary — or at least an "action figureen". Jason Camlot is a scholar of Victorian nonsense and humorous verse and these poems are a 'howl' amidst the "slithy borogroves" sort of affair, a wild, brilliantly refitted variety theater act. Other pieces, equally wan, hilarious, noir, plumb nineteen thirties Hollywood (and present day movieland) hijinks, Hemingway's war-with-booze style, and the dark obsessions of Important Men. The writer and his writing is 'past' conscious, but completely versed in contemporary Canadian and American poetry. This is an immensely funny, witty, up-to-date collection — zany, zippy, and zine-y!
Jason Camlot is a Montreal-born poet and scholar. His first collection of poems, The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000) was nominated for the Quebec Writer's Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. He has published a chapbook with illustrations by Canadian artist Betty Goodwin entitled, Lines Crossed Out (Delirium Press, 2005). Attention All Typewriters (DC Books, 2005) is his second collection of poems. He is a Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.
"The book is deceptively easy to read and packed with pop-cultural references, while skillfully skipping between an array of styles and personae."
— McGill Tribune, Jan. 2006
"Jason Camlot packs a lot into the 100-plus pages of Attention All Typewriters. His wit and erudition are everywhere apparent."
— Montreal Review of Books, Spring/Summer 2006
"Playing with the form and, throughout this collection, with ideas about the real work of the poet, Camlot is finding and admitting and contemplating and celebrating his office upon earth."
— Broken Pencil, #30
"Jason Camlot's new book is an enigmatic and funny tour de force. Riding the board of high culture, it surfs the waves of pop that break relentlessly over our lives and emerges tangled in seaweed and garbage, soaked, but still standing."
— david antin
"Jason Camlot finds poetry in the most unlikely places: in hilarious stoned college dorm memories, the boredom of 'meaningless' office jobs, a rhymed litany of frequented drinking haunts, or a confessional meditation on warmongering America. I applaud these poems for their slightly jaded integrity, for their formal astuteness and wit, for their engagement with a not-so-desirable reality. Camlot valiantly fights the good fight: against conformity and numbness, against that which excludes poetry from daily life."
— David Trinidad
"Nothing…would have prepared me (or you either) for the the incomparable intelligence, wit and formal virtuosity that distinguishes Attention All Typewriters... the very best collection of poetry published in 2005 in Canada…"
—Word: Canada's Magazine for Readers + Writers
"[Camlot] is a unique poet, notable for his sheer imagination and ludic exuberance… Attention All Typewriters is quite unlike anything else I'm aware of on the Canadian poetry scene."
— Books in Canada
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