The Collected Works is a difficult text to categorise generically. Its subject is historical – the late nineteenth century American outlaw William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid – yet its approach is every bit as fictive as biographical, if not more so. Ondaatje himself has referred to the text as a poem, yet the book is a collage of poetry, prose and image, incorporating quotation from, and pastiche of, both historical and pop-culture sources. The best way to describe it, perhaps, is as a work of historiographic metafiction, viewing the past, and the past’s textual remains in the present, through a highly self-conscious, self-reflexive and fragmented literary filter.

The text’s full title &#

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Published 17 March 2004

Citation: Webb, Ryan. "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems ". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 March 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5864, accessed 20 November 2009.]