With his first full-length work since the acclaimed Spiral Agitator (2000), Steve Venright  sails even further out onto uncharted literary waters. Floors of Enduring Beauty is laden with delirious extended prose poems, distorted philosophical musings, elaborate advice for instant gratification, a spoonerist narrative that rollicks on the high seas and other products of Venright’s ecstatic, hilarious and sometimes downright rude vision. It’s Baudelaire meets Lewis Carroll meets Monty Python—and it’s unlike anything else in Canadian literature.

“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.” — Rob Thomas (The Varsity)

"Venright’s adroit adages always astonish and amaze, as he offers his tour of the nerve cathedral." — Karl Jirgens (Rampike)

"One of the most exciting books of Canadian poetry in recent memory."
—Alessandro Porco ( Books in Canada)

"Venright has written and filled the prescription for all who have ever hunted snarks, practiced Cranial Theremin Ouija, or counted themselves among the ranks of Post-Historical Incubi, Somnivores, Philip K. Dickheads or Rimbaudelautreamontians. (The back cover taxonomy, of which these are only a few representative species, approaches Joycean proportions.).... These pieces show a deft rhetorical slight-of-hand that, like the narratives of Maldoror, both assert and undermine the credulity of the narrator's seductive incredulities." —Tom Orange (Rain Taxi)

SELECTIONS
Nuevocations
The Unedited Word of God
The Last Invitation of Summer

“I loved [Straunge Wunder]. Part Borges, part Calvino, a touch of Frederick Brown; I really enjoyed it.” — Terence McKenna, author of The Archaic Revival & True Hallucinations

“Venright is here practicing a lost magical art...invoking states of consciousness we all feared extinct.” — Michael Dean, author of The Walled Garden & In Search of the Perfect Lawn

“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 Crystallography

“Definitley adds to the canon of sublime literature.” —Samuel Andreyev (THE EXPERT PRESS)

“Notes is high-density digital poetry for the ‘90s.... Like Burroughs, Venright slides out of the commonplace into the bizarre so quickly that it leaves the reader with a feeling of vertiginous uncertainty about what, exactly, the real is.... This is top-notch work.... Even if you don’t normally read poetry — especially if you don’t normally read poetry — you should read this...it’ll renew your faith in an artform your high-school English teacher did his (or her) best to alienate you from for life.” — Darren Wershler-Henry, author of Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs

 “One of the most interesting and imaginative first books of Canadian poetry I’ve read in a long time.”
         —Stephen Morrissey (Poetry Canada Review)