The 2nd Edition of Dennis Cooley's
Bloody Jackis a 280-page volume written with an often maniacal sense of humor, spanning a wide range of genres. Only three pieces from the original edition (published in 1984) are excluded, 28 new pieces are added. Though the majority of the pieces are poetry, the text also contains prose, songs, a crossword puzzle and a mock quiz as well as letters, reviews of the earlier edition, newspaper articles, and excerpts from a movie script which has never existed, all of which require the reader to constantly query the factual basis of what s/he is reading. As Douglas Barbour states in the text's introduction, Cooley “[...] undermines the documentary impulse at every turn, using documents in order to subvert the apparently solid reality they represent”…
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Citation: Lent, John, Alexis Ratz. "Bloody Jack". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 August 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=15618, accessed 25 November 2024.]