Avant-Garden Reading Series

A short interview with Liz Howard

rob mclennan

Liz Howard was born and raised in rural Northern Ontario and is currently a poet and cognition research officer in Toronto. She is co-curator of the feminist reading series AvantGarden and graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing from The University of Guelph. Her chapbook Skullambient (Ferno House Press) was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

A short interview with Sachiko Murakami

rob mclennan

Sachiko Murakami : photo credit: Carmel Purkis

Sachiko Murakami is the author of the poetry collections The Invisibility Exhibit (2008), Rebuild (2011), and

Recently in Jacket2

Pitch of Poetry

Charles Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, Spring 2016 (352 pages | 6 x 9)

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.”

David Herd: THROUGH the Border

Stephen Collis

I want to begin this series of commentaries on the Biotariat — a term I will use to explore the coming resistance of “bare life” — by looking at a poetry which directly addresses the legal excision of certain subjects. I have in mind here David Herd’s excellent 2016 Carcanet book Through, which, along with Herd’s organizing and editing of the Refugee Tales project and volumes, constitutes an extensive foray into the violence of borders and the creation and management of the state of exception. Herd explores the interpenetration of spaces and languages of, on the one hand, bordering and exclusion, and on the other, as a grassroots counter-system, spaces and languages of welcome and inclusion — thresholds, commons, and pilgrims’ paths.

'The heart's vast and cratered purpose'

'In June the Labyrinth'

Elizabeth Savage

Photo of Hogue (left) © Sylvain Gallais.

Cynthia Hogue’s In June the Labyrinth turns from the meditations on grief and loss Revenance illuminated with tact and grace to the dimensions of mortality itself. The book’s protagonist, Elle, at once a distinct personality and a compilation of formidable women, suffers, recovers, and dies by the series’ end.