Since the early 1990s, Montreal’s David McGimpsey has been producing his unique, pop-acculturated poetry and fiction, indebted in equal parts to TV shows such as Hawaii Five-0 and Charlie’s Angels as well as Shakespearean tragedy and the Miltonic elegy. His poems and performances have garnered a wide readership and popular acclaim across North America. Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey gathers together, for the first time, a collection of essays that serve to highlight and explicate the scope and complexity of McGimpsey’s poetic practice. The collected essays (by lauded poets and scholars such as Nick Mount, Jason Camlot and Elizabeth Bachinsky) examine McGimpsey’s various positions on literary history, class, nationalism, humor, love, and aesthetics, all of which are often mutually imbricated in McGimpsey’s work. The book concludes with an entertaining and enlightening in-depth interview with McGimpsey, where he discusses, with all the wit and keen critical acumen we’ve come to expect, everything from his early experiences growing up in Montreal’s East-End to the prospect of sympathy in and through poetry. Population Me is a timely addition to Canadian letters and a collection that makes clear McGimpsey’s significant contribution to contemporary Canadian literature.

Alessandro Porco is a poet, critic, and scholar from Toronto, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Porco lives in Wilmington, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UNCW.

Jerrold Levy was born and raised in New York City. He is the grandson of poet Mina Loy and son of art dealer Julien Levy. He attended Black Mountain College from 1947 to 1950, studying under Ilya Bolotowsky, Merce Cunningham, and Charles Olson. In 1959, Levy received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Richard Negro grew up in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, a suburb located twenty-five miles outside New York City. He attended Black Mountain College from 1947 to 1950 and was a star pupil of physicist Natasha Goldowski and poet M.C. Richards. He later studied physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Alessandro Porco is a poet, critic, and scholar from Toronto, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Porco lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UNCW.

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