Joe Rosenblatt is a poet of wit and contrivance—along with John Robert Colombo one of the few to emerge among Canadian experimential poets of the past fifteen years. He delights in outrageous effects—in the juxtaposition of the sublime and the frivolous, the sacred and the obscene, sophisticated surrealism and the blatancies of pure sound.

Since his second book, The LSD Leacock (1966), his predominant theme has been the essential unity of cosmic life. To Rosenblatt, the human, animal, vegetable, and mineral realms share and interchange even their individual atoms of being. As the title of The LSD Leacock implies, he casts himself as a visionary who sees beyond the false and orgulous barriers man has placed between himself and the rest of creation. Like Leacock, he makes cynical note of human hypocrisy, but adds to this an absurd and horrific view of the insect and animal kingdoms...