Description
Margaret Christakos' fourth poetry collection playfully filters the refrains of domestic experience through an ever-shifting procedural sieve, rendering a series of ground-out texts which lift the vernacular to the plane of exuberant bliss. A woman's kaleidoscopic self-image emerges where memory and culture double back on each other amidst the practical realities of needing to leave the scene of mothering in order to write at all. The lover within the mother is invited throughout to speak and deliver herself through a series of impassioned memoirs to an exhilerating and complex embrace of the present.
About the author
Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. Born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario, she has worked as a poet, writer, editor, instructor, and poetry-culture builder in Toronto since the late 1980s. Her body of work includes nine collections of poetry, numerous chapbooks, a novel, and an inter-genre memoir. She has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and is a recipient of the ReLit Award for poetry and the Bliss Carman Award. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos was published in 2017 (Laurier Poetry series). She has held appointments as Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University, London Public Library, and the University of Alberta. She is associate faculty with the MFA program in creative writing at University of Guelph-Humber and has taught widely as a sessional, most recently at Ryerson University. In 2018–2019, she was Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, University of Toronto. She has three adult children and lives in Toronto.
Editorial Reviews
Christakos' poems process collage in all its meanings, revamping the sexual: the personal and language's lurid tryst and performance. These poems are something else. Becomingly so, they evade random sampling as meaning; they have their own forceful wonder, impact behind the eyes.Ó (Arc)
