Passionate critic, principled citizen, attentive reader and editor, and energizing teacher – Roy Miki is all these and more, a poet whose writing articulates a moving body of work. The two main areas of his passionate research and writing – social critique and poetics – inform each other in these essays, poems, and artwork compiled to mark a milestone in the life of an important public intellectual.

Contributors from across North America take Miki’s literary and artistic achievements as a starting point for analytical and creative reflections on key artistic, social, and political movements of the second half of the 20th century. Essays on poetics by Daphne Marlatt and George Bowering combine with original poems by Fred Wah and Michael Barnholden, among others, to explore topics ranging from voice, to love, to translation. Mona Oikawa, Dave Gaertner, Phinder Dulai, and Cindy Mochizuki write or create artwork on social justice, placing Miki’s redress work in relation to the politics and art of other historical reparations. Ashok Mathur, Ayaka Yoshimizu, Mark Nakada, David Fujino, and Hiromi Goto present various views of biotext. Jerry Zaslove, Susan Crean, Alessandra Capperdoni, and Smaro Kamboureli discuss the public intellectual’s relationship to institutions. The collection ends with an interview with Miki on interrelations between his photographic and poetic practices.

Miki’s history reflects that of the West Coast’s literary world. Not only did he found the influential literary journal West Coast Line, but he has researched and written works on poets Roy Kiyooka, George Bowering, and bp Nichol. Miki taught many of the poets and academics now working and writing on the West Coast.

Maia Joseph focuses on Canadian urban literature, urbanism and regionalism, the ethics and politics of artistic practice and the interdisciplinary theorization of space and community. Joseph co-edited Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (2012).

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Christine Kim is an assistant professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, contemporary Canadian literature, and diasporic writing. She has recently published articles in Open Letter, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Asian Canadian Writing beyond Autoethnography (WLU Press, 2008). She is currently working on a book-length project titled From Multiculturalism to Globalization: The Cultural Politics of Asian Canadian Writing.

Sophie McCall teaches contemporary First Nations and Canadian literatures in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (2011).

Melina Baum Singer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. Her research explores transnational and diasporic literatures in English Canada. She has co-edited, with Lily Cho, two special issues of Open Letter, “Poetics and Public Culture” and “Dialogues on Poetics and Public Culture”.

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Larissa Lai is also a novelist and poet. Her first full-length poetry book, Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp, 2009), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.Talonbooks published her co-written book, Tracing the Lines:Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki in 2012.

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Christopher Lee is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2012). Lee also co-edited Tracing the Lines (Talonbooks, 2012).

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“Readers of this anthology will certainly appreciate the variety of pieces categorized under the four main sections: Poetics, Social Justice, Biotext, and Institutions. They are introduced to varied tastes, styles, collaborative initiatives, and techniques. … In the end, readers will discover that the lines of thought and expression here converge, and the paths (from light and playful to serious) intersect to articulate something meaningful and worth reading.” – Canadian Literature