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The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Michael Ondaatje · 1970 CE · Poem · Modern / American · Contemporary

Poems, prose fragments, invented interviews, a comic-book panel and one blank photograph assemble the last months of a New Mexico gunman and of the sheriff who had been his friend. Heat, horses, gangrene and the men he is said to have killed are set down flatly by a voice that keeps sliding between the killer's and the archive's. Ondaatje's breakthrough took the Governor General's Award and drew a question in the Canadian parliament about why public money had paid for it.

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