Myrmurs: an exploded sestina - Softcover

Maguire, Shannon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771661607 ISBN 13: 9781771661607

Publisher: Book*hug Press, 2015

Synopsis

Poetry. Drawings by David Bateman. How are self-regulating systems such as cities, languages, and ant colonies alike or unalike? What does a medieval love poem have to do with neocolonialism? What politics does interspecies desire entail? How can we escape the trappings of enlightenment and make meaning otherwise? MYRMURS: AN EXPLODED SESTINA explores the connection between medieval texts and textuality, contemporary poetics and politics. In this book, acclaimed Canadian poet Shannon Maguire uses the form of the sestina, a medieval love-poem that follows a set pattern based around six end-words, as a starting point to explore living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; ants; post-human entanglements and attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it. Following on her critically acclaimed, FUR(L) PARACHUTE (published by BookThug in 2013), this second collection in Maguire's planned medievalist trilogy develops a new type of poetic form—"the exploded sestina," borrowing the sestina's pattern of repetition and obsession with the number six, but transforming it into a 39-part network of poems. Beside and around the text are notes or "illuminations" that hint at some of the ways Maguire thinks about self-organization and political and amorous attachments.

About this title

About the Author:

Shannon Maguire is the author of MYRMURS: AN EXPLODED SESTINA (BookThug, 2015), and FUR(L) PARACHUTE (BookThug, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Also a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Fruit Machine, and the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems for "The Fur Parachute Suite" in CV2, Maguire's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Best American Experimental Writing of 2014, Jacket2, Event, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, an MA in English from Brock University, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she studies noise and queer and Métis poetics. Born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie of predominantly Irish and Métis heritage, Shannon now divides her time between Waterloo, Toronto, and Sault Ste. Marie. Wherever she finds herself, she reads and writes incessantly.

About this edition

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1771661607
• ISBN 13: 9781771661607
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112