Operations

From poet-provocateur Moez Surani comes Operations―a book-length poetic inventory of contemporary rhetoric of violence and aggression, as depicted through the evolution of the language used to name the many military operations conducted by UN Member Nations since the organization's inception in 1945.

With Operations, Surani draws on contemporary poetic traditions, including conceptual and inventory poetics, to accomplish two important things: On the one hand, he shows that no word is free from connoting violence, while on the other hand, he provokes readers to consider whether their personal values match the values of the military operation that are conducted by their countries.

By pulling military language away from euphemism--effectively, making it account for its doublespeaking ways―Operations gives voice to the many lives lost in conflicts around the world, in a volume that will speak equally to lovers of contemporary poetry, language, and linguistics, as to readers interested in politics, international relations, and public discourse.

MOEZ SURANI's writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, Best Canadian Poetry, and The Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported research in India and East Africa. He has been an artist-in-residence in Finland, Italy, Latvia, Myanmar, Switzerland, Taiwan, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and at MacDowell in the US. He is the author of the novel, The Legend of Baraffo, and various poetry books, including Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real and Operations. Surani lives in Toronto.