Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems

The collected longer poems of brilliant Canadian poet Sharon Thesen

Refabulations collects and reanimates the longer and serial poems from Sharon Thesen’s œuvre, from her first book in 1980 to today. It is a record of a life in language, created by a dexterous and renegade poet whose mind is ever at work in the poem. A self-described “receiver,” Thesen energizes her decades of vital work by providing new neighbours and contexts for a body of poetry that has always recognized disaster, laughed at folly, and made its home in the vigour of the Now. Refabulations includes a short introductory essay by the editor, Erín Moure, an afterword-interview with the poet, and a bibliography.

Poet, editor and teacher Sharon Thesen (born Tisdale, SK) has spent almost all her life in British Columbia. After studies at Simon Fraser University, she began teaching in 1975 at the then-Capilano College in North Vancouver, where for many years she edited The Capilano Review. Artemis Hates Romance, her first book of poetry in 1980, was followed by thirteen more, three of them finalists for the Governor General's Award: Confabulations, 1984; The Beginning of the Long Dash, 1987; and The Good Bacteria, 2006. She edited The Vision Tree, a selected poems by Phyllis Webb (Governor General’s Award, 1982), two editions of the The New Long Poem Anthology (1991 and 2001), and, with Ralph Maud, two volumes of correspondence between American poet Charles Olson and book-designer and Joyce scholar Frances Boldereff (1999 and 2012). At UBC Okanagan, where she taught from 2003 to 2012, Thesen and poet Nancy Holmes co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. The Receiver (2017) is her most recent collection, and in 2021, The Wig-Maker was published, a book-length poem created in concert with Janet Gallant from Gallant’s memoirs. Since 2020, the annual “Sharon Thesen Lecture” at UBC Okanagan honours Thesen’s contribution to poetry and poetics. Her archives are held at the McGill University Library in Montreal and at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections in Burnaby, BC.

Erín Moure has published over fifty books: poetry, essays, memoir, as well as translations and co-translations of poetry from French, Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, Portuñol and Ukrainian into English. Recent works are Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (Wesleyan, 2017), Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star, 2017), Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017), Uxío Novoneyra’s The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books, 2020), Juan Gelman’s Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Eulalia Books, 2020), Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug, 2020), and Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021). Moure holds two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and Spain, was 2017 Creative Fellow at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, 2019 international translator in residence at Queen’s College, Oxford, 2020 Kelly Writers House Fellow at UPenn, and gave the 2021 Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture at Naropa University. In 2021, she was Jake MacDonald writer in residence at the University of Winnipeg. A new work of poetry and hybrid text, Theophylline, will appear in 2023 from Anansi. She lives in Montreal.