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Space Between Her Lips

The Poetry of Margaret Christakos

By Margaret Christakos
Edited by Gregory Betts
Subjects Literary Criticism, Canadian Literature, Poetry
Series Laurier Poetry Hide Details
Paperback : 9781771122979, 96 pages, April 2017
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781771122993, 96 pages, April 2017

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Biographical Note

“Not Finished”: Byways of Introductions

Poems

Threshold

Words

From Home Birth in Seven Easy Steps

Missing/

G1. Video Technician

G2. Host

G3. Social Scientist

Porch

Hope: By-Products

'The Gorge'

From Recalling the Cord

Pere Ii

Wellington (Part 1)

Grounds 2a.

Grounds 3a.

Grounds 12b.

Grounds 18a.

Grounds For Action

Visual Splendour Coupons

M1. Uk Breast Milk Toxic: 13 July 99

M2. Ada And Eva

Strapless

Andalou

From Lovely One

Cri de Coeur, Deferred

Uppity (A Spiritual)

Last Words

First Words

The Offending Ear

An Open Erotics of Gzowski

Tsal Day N Night

Grass

Voice Note – 0045

Lake

Charger

Afterwords / Margaret Christakos

Description

Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more.

Gregory Betts’ introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life — including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country’s leading feminist authors and thinkers — with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it.

In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.