Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity—the capitalist vision of literary originality, where ownership is of prime value.

As a book that calls into question beginnings and ends, Mêmewars has no closure and no “back” cover; six individual texts work from two separate beginnings: they clash in the “middle”—an unstable and shifting “centre.” However through a self-reflexive practice of authorization, intention is delegitimized as the centre-piece decentres, and becomes yet another beginning.

Adeena Karasick is a New York–based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin), “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins).Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Adeena Karasick's profile page

• Short-listed, BC Book Prize: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

“Mêmewars is electricity in language, eccentricity at its best where ‘there’s a profusion of presents.’ This book makes eye contact with she and with me. It reminds me how being a reader can be exciting.”
—Nicole Brossard

“[Karasick] enacts language in a concrete way, so that it becomes a sort of golem figure she has animated through the sacred words. And she calls on the figural body of words (their etymology, morphology, phonology and usage) more than their meanings to build her poetry-essays.”
—Canadian Literature

“[Karasick] enacts language in a concrete way, so that it becomes a sort of golem figure she has animated through the sacred words.”
—Canadian Literature