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Literary Criticism Poetry

My Beloved Wager

Essays from a Writing Practice

photographs by Erín Moure

edited by Smaro Kamboureli

Publisher
NeWest Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2009
Category
Poetry, Essays, Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781897126455
    Publish Date
    Oct 2009
    List Price
    $24.95

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Description

My Beloved Wager gathers essays by noted poet and translator Erín Moure, and records a quarter century of writing practice emerging from a city of exhilarating poetic and translatory possibility: Montreal. In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as a way of life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.

About the authors

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erín Moure's profile page

Smaro Kamboureli is a Professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. The author of On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem and Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literatures in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism, she is also the editor of the anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature and Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories, and the co-editor of many volumes, including (with Robert Zacharias) Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies and (with Christl Verduyn) Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology.

Smaro Kamboureli's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"In keeping with a Montaignian definition, Erin Mouré's My Beloved Wager offers us a feast of exciting essays, ranging from such provocative theoretical pieces as "The Anti-Anaesthetic," to hilarious send-ups like "Poets and Management Gurus," to trenchant analyses of Fernando Pessoa and of medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, and even a set of "concrete" prose meditations. Throughout this dazzling collection, Moure displays an astonishing familiarity with French poststructuralist theory-beautifully adapted to her purposes-coupled with a highly original sense of the poet's aesthetic and cultural role at this juncture of history." -Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature
"The pleasures of My Beloved Wager? Many. An outspoken, must-read book of generous, faceted essays about a writing, reading, and thinking practice. A brave, open-hearted book of literary plenitude and theoretical intelligence about the precisions of the somatic, about elations of translation, about transitioning nations, about the lope across borders, about sexualities and genders. Moure's collection of essays and commentaries offers a responsive, penetrating, and alert justification for the arts of poetry and translation as radical practices of form, content, sound, ideology-and being. Erín Moure, Canadian, also carries the passport of a dazzling country: the Democratic Network of Languages." -Rachel Blau DuPlessis, feminist literary critic and poet

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