Book excerpt: Poetry. THE HEADLESS MAN awakens into a strange landscape. He must make sense of it through his actions, striving to determine whether there is a place for him in a world not made in his image or whether he must imagine something different in order to be. He cannot speak, see, or hear in the usual ways, so he must learn to do these things using other parts of his body, leading him to a fuller sense of himself. In this gothic, picaresque narrative, laced with horror and humour, Montreal surrealist Peter Dubé addresses his concern with queer challenges to identity and sexual boundaries, exploring questions about insider and outsider, what constitutes the "normal" and what is relegated to the realm of the "monstrous."