This book was reissued by Book Thug in 2011 with a new afterword by bill bissett.Internet: This book tells the story of the eponymous superhero and his struggle to find happiness. Bald, beaked and wattled, "Cap""”Nichol's pet name for him"”is hardly the rock-jawed conqueror. In fact, with his visor, spandex, wings and six-pack abs, our man looks like a mutant chicken. Cap is a sad sack: self-conscious, plagued by doubts, undone by indecision, torn about his purpose in life. Nichol shouts encouragements from the sidelines ("O CAPTAIN POETRY SEE IT THRU") but, plum out of ideas, Cap finds himself in a Groundhog Day funk ("O he sings like a madman, talks like he's sane, / and does it each day again and again"). And popping up everywhere in the book (in one case even cradling Captain Poetry's head) is Nichol's most intriguing and disquieting alter ego: Milt the Morph, the dementedly smiling, empty-eyed troublemaker. It's obvious Nichol intended the book to be both a send-up of the poetic tradition and a kiss-off: he writes of Cap, English poetry's greatest defender, "yur slippers made of paper / yur words made out of milk // yuve seen better days." The Captain Poetry Poems is a running ledger on whatever the hell occurred to Nichol when writing it; Boy Wonder serving notice of his independence. The iconoclasm of the project inspired Michael Ondaatje to make a short documentary on Nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry, released at the same time. But except for one excerpt reprinted in a few anthologies"”an amusing quarrel between love interest Madame X and Captain Poetry ("dear Captain Poetry, / your poetry is trite")"”the chapbook is a largely overlooked slice of Nichol's fugitive canon. Younger fans may not even know it exists. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.