How to Write is an instruction manual for the demise of ownership. A multitudinous dialogue of writers and subjects, words and contexts, it unleashes a cacophony of voices where authors don't own their words, they merely rent them from others. --

With exhaustive pursuits and minimal incerventions, derek beaulieu consistently produces some of the most baffling, oblique, unreadable--and ultimately, on reflection, absolutely logical and necessary--works of conceptual poetry now being written...beaulieu takes surgical samples from unlikely texts and the test results are fascinating.--Craig Dworkin --

"We live in an age of science and abundance."--or so opens Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, and 75 years later derek beaulieu's How To Write offers its own record of response to that perpetual abundance. Through procedural and conceptual writing strategies, beaulieu recasts his way through English literature--from Cicero to Agatha Christie--to confirm that great artists steal beaulieu pirates a course that collides How To Write with How to Read (that last frontier) by composing with the unlikely bits of our shared literary history Rarely has an inventory produced such a profoundly personal and relevant reacrion to "an age of science and abundance."--Robert Fitterman --

There was Linnaeus then and there's beaulieu now: out of chaos, order, or at least a working taxonomy and the promise of progress like Linnaeus himself, derek beaulieu disappointed his parents by showing neither aptitude nor desire for the priesthood. Like Linnaeus' Systema Naturae, beaulieu's How to Write purs conceptual fiction through its categorical paces, up to and including the pornographic, the pirated and the purely indexical. This is a how to manual of modestly monstrous proportions.--Vanessa Place --Book Jacket.