Spiral Agitator

by Steve Venright

Steve Venright, the true heir to the literary legacy of Henri Michau, Christopher Dewdney and Jorge Luis Borges, is the only surrealist ever to come from Sarnia, Ontario. Spiral Agitator, his fourth book, is a sumptuous assortment of prose poems and visual art from beyond the Turbulated Curtain.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 1994

About the author

Steve Venright is a Toronto-based visual artist and poet whose books include Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000), Floors of Enduring Beauty (Mansfield Press, 2007), and The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings (Feed Dog/Anvil Press, 2017). Through his Torpor Vigil Records label, he has released several albums of somniloquies, soundscapes, and songs, including Dreaming Like Mad with Dion McGregor: Yet More Outrageous Recordings of the World’s Most Renowned Sleeptalker and Samuel Andreyev’s The Tubular West. As a purveyor of neurotechnology in the 1990s, he exploited the psychedelic potential of pulsed light with his Hallucintatorium—a sort of retinal-circus sideshow that earned him the designation of “Toronto’s prime purveyor of non-chemically altered states” (Eye Weekly). Around the turn of the millenniun, he began producing original forms of digital abstracts based on his own acrylic paintings. These “variegraphs” and “tryptiles” have since found their way onto the covers of books and magazines, as well as a number of gallery walls. Presently, Steve is completing The Somnolent Adventures of Dion McGregor, a book about the lives—both dream and waking—of the legendary somniloquist (to feature dozens of new transcriptions of McGregor's outlandish unconscious orations, fortuitously recorded in the 1960s by his roommate and songwriting partner Michael Barr). He is also well along in the writing of a spoonerist hardboiled-detective thriller, surely to be the only novel of its kind. Born in the town of Sarnia in 1961, Steve crossed the plains of Southwestern Ontario at age twenty and has lived in Toronto ever since.

“If Steve Venright gave only the minimum, it would still be magnificent.”
—Canadian Literature

“Steve Venright proves that Spiral Agitator, one of the most exciting books of Canadian poetry in recent memory, was no fluke, and that his is one of the most fascinating careers in contemporary Canadian poetry.”
—Books in Canada

“Venright’s genius (yes, genius!) is most evident in three key poems…. The book’s magisterial work, ‘Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner,’ was, I contend, the single best poem published in Canada in 2007.... [It] is delirious fun. It excites the erotic ear. Venright’s poem is a work of total virtuosity ... peerless in Canadian poetry. Indeed, the same may be said for Floors of Enduring Beauty as a whole.”
—Arc Poetry Magazine

“Spiral Agitator is a tour de force. This is one of the liveliest books I have ever read.... It’s an enormous task to even try to describe how funny Venright is.”
—The Varsity

“I loved Straunge Wunder. Part Borges, part Calvino, a touch of Frederick Brown ….”
— Terence McKenna, author of The Archaic Revival and True Hallucinations

“Venright’s adroit adages always astonish and amaze.”
— Rampike

“Venright is a wondrous stranger. His exotic writing brings us closer to an omelette—a sunny homage to surrealist delectation. We hallucinate a windmill when we read these gems of linguistic psilocybin.”
—Christian Bök, author of Eunoia and The Xenotext: Book1