Poems of resistance against death and the dead squares. After years of collecting and reading the stuff, Byron Coley started writing poetry in 1998 as a reaction to the death vortex seemingly surrounding everything in his life at the time. From that moment on, he wrote lots of poems, mainly published in chapbooks, broadsides, and underground magazines: all almost impossible to find. Defense Against Squares is the first major collection of Byron Coley's poetry to be published. It features odes to personal heroes such as Jack Rose, Lou Reed, and Captain Beefheart, poems against the rotten world of George Bush and words of resistance against all squares. With an introduction by Kim Gordon, cover drawing of the author by Charles Burns, and French translation supervised by John-Glassco prize winner Marie Frankland. Softcover; 166 pages; Bilingual; 4.75 x 8.5 inches.

Byron Coley was born in Manhattan in 1956 and currently lives on an old farm in Western Massachusetts with his wife, the inventor Lili Dwight. He has written extensively about underground culture since the mid-70s. Known most prominently for his work for Forced Exposure in the 1980s, he has been resident editor at NY Rocker, managing editor Take It!, underground editor Spin, ghost editor Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, etc. He has been a columnist for the L.A. Weekly, Arthur, Spin, le Bathyscaphe, Harp, and so on. He co-wrote No-Wave with Thurston Moore (2008). He has written liner notes for hundreds of records, spewed for more zines than anyone could ever remember, and contributed to various anthologies. He currently writes for The Wire, codirects the label Feeding Tube Records, and publishes Bull Tongue Review, a quarterly journal of post-rock cultural pluralism. Historical straight jobs include dishwasher, snowmaker, Teamster, carpenter, line cook, janitor, doorman, panhandler, and drug tester. Byron Coley's previous book for L'Oie de Cravan was the collection of his articles, C'est La Guerre: Early Writings 1978-1983 (2011).