Dandelions for Bhabha - Softcover

Joseph, Clara A. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1925231712 ISBN 13: 9781925231717

Publisher: Interactive Press, 2018

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Ranging from satire to meditation to philosophy to the comic, Clara Joseph’s second book of poetry, Dandelions for Bhabha, is an intense engagement with philosophers and literary/cultural theorists and their controversial positions. Her poems reflect on the postmodern condition when “The screaming begins at the wall / when one chick is taken” and “Universal Justice is dragged / to Auschwitz.” The collection, divided into three sections, “Descartes’ Lover,” “Jus’ Thinkin’,” and “To Talisman,” engages with ethics and with thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jeremy Bentham, Homi K. Bhabha, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Mahatma Gandhi, Stephen Greenblatt, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gayatri Spivak. The poems in Dandelions for Bhabha are, as the title hints, enchanting and unexpected opportunities to philosophize art and aestheticize thought. Narratives of miracles, reflections on visuals, and dialogues of the dead enter the hopes, joys, and wonders of daily living. Joseph’s skill is to narrow the gap between the creative and the critical, and to provoke.

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About the Author

Clara Joseph’s poetry has appeared in the Toronto Review, Mother Earth International, Prosopisia: An International Journal of Poetry & Creative Writing, Canadian Women’s Studies, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Transnational Literature, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Literature and Aesthetics. Her debut book of poetry, The Face of the Other (A Long Poem) (2016), was published by Interactive Publications, Brisbane. The book builds on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and invites the reader to meet the other person. Joseph is the author of several academic articles and book chapters. Her book, The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2008), was nominated by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction Prize. It also won a national Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, Canada. Her edited books include, Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (Rodopi, 2006), Theology and Literature: Rethinking Reader Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), and special issues of the journal World Literature Written in English – The Postcolonial and Globalisation (2002) and Rethinking the Postcolonial and Globalisation (2002). Dandelions for Bhabha is a collection of poems that variously respond to theories and theorists popular in literary and cultural studies. In poems ranging from the ridiculous to the meditative, Joseph considers poststructuralist and postcolonial positions on determinism, responsibility, and the general state of affairs of our baffled and baffling world. She has a PhD in English from York University and is an associate professor of English and an adjunct associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary.