Long Division is a book of poetic commentary that plots a steady course of disillusion. Working in explicit dialogue with Dada, the surrealist poets, spiritual writing, and drawing on midrash as a wellspring, Gil McElroy captures in poetry the process of a mind in thought. Written in asides and afterwords, comments and commentaries, and interruptions and insertions, these poems challenge and disrupt meaning and intention.

Carefully planned and written with an easy confidence, these poems ruminate on time and chance, astronomy and biology, intertextuality and the interplay of the author's and reader's voice. They interrogate and are, themselves, an internal interrogation through which division wends, splitting words into new units of meaning or reassembling them into new shapes unencumbered by the halos of meaning, reference, and allusion they have accrued.

This is contemporary experimental poetry at its finest, at once abstract and distinct, celestial and personal, a drama of the mind as it engages with and responds to the world and time. Long Division takes what is complex and explores its simplicity before taking what is expected to be simple and showing it instead to be musical and strange.

Born in Metz, France, poet Gil McElroy grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English Literature at Queen’s University in Ontario. His poems and other works have been published in countless periodicals throughout North America since the late 1970s; issued in a number of self-published chapbooks, broadsheets, and one-of-a-kind book works; and anthologized in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993–2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2003), and Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1999). He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.

McElroy has also been an independent curator and freelance art critic for 20 years, organizing exhibitions for public art galleries and museums in Canada and writing art criticism for magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia. A selection of his catalogue essays and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and in the anthology CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002). His show ST. ART: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol pays tribute to one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Originally mounted at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum in Charlottetown, P.E.I. in May through October, 2000, it later moved to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before touring the country throughout 2001. McElroy’s curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition also won the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts.

Gil McElroy's profile page