This book focuses on effective communication and is designed to help the reader achieve greater fluency in English. Adopting a practical approach, it makes the important distinction between what is essential (‘core’) for intelligibility and what is relatively unimportant (‘peripheral’).

Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such as Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language. --Book Jacket.

Emigrating to a new universe can be hard. People in the new universe eat for sustenance (rather than get their energy directly from sunlight). Eww! They use umbrellas to protect them from the rain (rather than pianos and anvils and safes and orangutans – oh, my! – falling from the sky). Their gods do not reward them in the afterlife for how funny they were while they were alive – as if any other qualities in life matter! Fleeing a dying universe is not for the faint of gall bladder! The Ugly Truth: is the final volume in Ira Nayman’s appropriately described Multiverse Refugees trilogy. In it, musicians are hoist on their own poetic petard, pies fly and four foot tall blue aliens with no hair and exaggeratedly round features who wear exquisite three piece suits find amusing new ways to die. As they say on Earth Prime 4-6-4-0-8-9 dash Omega, “May the Audi Enz laugh upon you all the days of your life!” “The name of the game here is wordplay. Non-stop, unrestrained, groan-worthy … inspired wordplay.” – Alex Good, reviewing Good Intentions Cover artwork by Hugh Spencer