Cultural Mischief: A Practical Guide to Multiculturalism

Cultural Mischief is a collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action. Whether digging up the midden under Greg Curnoe’s house, revisiting Hiroshima, attending a dog breeder’s show or retelling the history of Quebec from the point of view of its founding nations, the Mohawks and Algonquins, Davey delivers startling vignettes at their funniest and most thoughtful.

This book is delightfully―and deceptively―simple. It provides the reader at one and the same time the most exquisitely enjoyable bedtime reading, and a wake-up call with a better hit than the best designer espresso.

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He was the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society―racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic―that drive this play.