Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975

"Finding Nothing is an excavation site for a special moment in Canadian poetic history."

Ron Verzuh, The Ormsby Review

"Many scholars will find Finding Nothing especially valuable for its informational and bibliographical content. Detailed lists of ephemeral little magazines and literary publishers, tabulations of contributors to the major periodicals, a fulsome index, and an appended glossary of ‘Intermedia and Transdisciplinary Groups’ further enhance this landmark study of a transformational phase in Canada’s cultural history."

Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser University, The Canadian Historical Review

“It is difficult to characterize Finding Nothing as anything less than a singularly important critical monograph that likely sets the terms of discussion in the field of Canadian avant-garde studies to come.” Scott Inniss, Canadian Literature

"Gregory Betts has produced a literary history of the avant-garde in Canada like no other. Finding Nothing offers deep reflection on the meaning of the new, including accounts of the positive transformational effects upon human structures of perception and the violent forms of erasure that the ‘transnational cultural flow’ of literary activity in and out of Vancouver has entailed since that space’s appropriation by European settlers, through its examination of the histories of modernism, up to the present. With a combination of fastidious archival research, deep critical insight and empathy, and a most engaging style of historical storytelling,　Betts has opened up important space for the development of alternative, decolonizing accounts of the literary avant-garde in settler Canada."

Jason Camlot, Professor of English and University Research Chair (Tier I) in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University

"Rich in aesthetic and personal anecdotes gleaned through interviews, Finding Nothing proposes that the mythologies of Vancouver modernist poetics both arose from colonial conditioning and worked against it. Readers will appreciate the intimate photographs and reprints of rare materials from private collections and institutional archives – the collation of these dispersals makes visible these absences from public spaces as an ongoing colonial erasure."

Felicity Tayler, Research Data Management Librarian and Interim Head of Research Services, University of Ottawa