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Adeena Karasick is a poet, cultural theorist and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She is currently Professor of Global Literature at St. John’s University. Her writing has been described as “electricity in language” and noted for its “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory”; it is marked with an urban, Jewish and feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production and blurs the lines between popular culture and scholarly discourse. Karasick has lectured and performed worldwide, participating on an international scale at conferences, telepoetic colloquia and literary festivals. She regularly publishes articles, reviews and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural / semiotic theory. She also produces videopoems and sound recordings of her work, which highlight its radical performativity.
The winner of the MPS Mobile Award as being the world’s first “Mobile Poet” whereby her work is being made available on mobile devices (cell phones and smartphones) throughout the world.
More information on Karasick and and her work can be found on adeenakarasick.com
Adeena Karasick was a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV. Produced and directed by Maureen Judge in association with Bravo!, and hosted by spoken word poet Andrea Thompson, Heart of a Poet is a hip half-hour show that takes viewers inside the poetry community, in all its various forms, alternate incarnations and unfettered diversity. For more information, please visit their web site heartofapoet.ca
Adeena Karasick’s video-poems are now accessible on YouTube. Check out the link.
Author photo credit: Safia Karasick Southey

April 2013 : This Poem in May 2013!
February 2013 : Rogue Beats at the Sidewalk Café
December 2012 : Ceci n'est pas un Téléphone!
December 2012 : Adeena & bill - Footage From Their 25th!
October 2012 : Adeena Karasick 40's 108
October 2012 : 25th Anniversary Launch for bill bissett and Adeena Karasick!
October 2012 : Karasick and Collis at Zinc Bar!
September 2012 : Fall into Surreal Instanter!
August 2012 : This Poem is Meeting Winnipeg
July 2012 : Kibitzing With Our Minister of Semiotic Turbulence
December 2011 : Adeena Karasick at post_moot
December 2011 : A B Series Launch For Two New bill bissett Books
December 2011 : Talonbooks Presents Karl and Christy Siegler's Farewell Bash
May 2011 : it's a bouche time!
April 2011 : Vancouver Is...The Place to Be!
February 2011 : Lingual Ladies (Put a Frame on It) - Adeena Karasick
January 2011 : North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival
December 2010 : Make That What: time and Artie Gold Launched in Vancouver
November 2010 : Adeena Karasick Reads From This Poem in Vancouver
September 2010 : This is Ground Control to bill bissett
AUTHOR AWARDS
One of the Best Books of 2009 for Amuse Bouche (About.com)
“Exuberance is Beauty” Award for Amuse Bouche, 2009
Bumbershoot Book Fair Award, "Most Adventurous Publication" for Dyssemia Sleaze, 2000.
People’s Choice Award, Electrolit International Videopoem Festival, Vancouver, BC for "Alphabet City", 1999.
MPS Mobile Award (For being the World’s First “Mobile poet”), 2008
BC Book Prize finalist (1994): Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Mêmewars
BOOK AWARDS
MêmewarsFinalist for the 1995 BC Book Prize: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
BOOK AWARDS
Dyssemia SleazeBumbershoot Most Adventurous Award Winner, 2000
BOOK AWARDS
Amuse BoucheOne of the Best Books of 2009 (About.com)
“Exuberance is Beauty” Award (2009)
”QUOTES OF NOTE
This Poem“Karasick’s is less a poetry of ideas than ideas of poetry – plural, cascading, exuberant in their cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory.”
– Charles Bernstein
“[Karasick’s] writing is an extraordinary tour de force in the new paraliterary initiative of ‘fiction/theory’ that blends various genres and revels in their ‘contamination.’ ”
– Canadian Book Review Annual
“ Karasick traces her creative lineage to medieval kabbalistic writings, which, as she points out, “urge the reader to experience language in ‘non-traditional ways’ — extract it from its use value and encourage one to somehow get inside these cosmic and erotic fields of discourse, harness language’s inherent power, and experience the sensation of ever-expanding ‘meaning.’” ”
– The Jewish Daily Forward
“strenuously playful..many bits of sly, allusive (cultural/social/political) commentary that slowly accumulates among all the words at play in the fields of the word, advancing an oblique critique of consumer capitalist culture & its workings…”
– Eclectic Ruckus
QUOTES OF NOTE
Amuse Bouche“Her writing is an extraordinary tour de force in the new paraliterary initiative of ‘fiction/theory’ that blends various genres and revels in their ‘contamination.’”
— Canadian Book Review Annual
“If today or in the future I were to knock on Karasick’s poem-door, and ask (assuming appropriate familiarity), ‘Can Adeena come out and play?’ I have little doubt that the answer would be, ‘Yes!’ and that right quick she’d be out on the porch and just like that she’d lexically skip and cartwheel down the street and around the corner, heading right to wherever it was that the words promised the most fun that day. I’d happily try to keep up with Karasick, just to see where she went and what kind of fun she got into. Even if she stumbled a bit, or took a wrong turn or two along the way, I’m sure it’d be, for my mind, a real good, a most interesting, time.” — Steven Fama
”QUOTES OF NOTE
The House that Hijack BuiltPerhaps the strangest, most irreverent and utterly shameless of possible responses to a tragedy, Karasick’s is also, finally, deeply, and compellingly human.
— Publishers Weekly
QUOTES OF NOTE
Dyssemia SleazeHer most visually compelling, over-the-top collection to date.
— Publishers Weekly
QUOTES OF NOTE
GenrecideBeautiful linguistic carnage…
— Word
Bridging the genre gap…
— Link
Visually striking…
— Jewish Post and News
QUOTES OF NOTE
Mêmewars“[Karasick] enacts language in a concrete way, so that it becomes a sort of golem figure she has animated through the sacred words. And she calls on the figural body of words (their etymology, morphology, phonology and usage) more than their meanings to build her poetry-essays.”
— Canadian Literature
“ Mêmewars is electricity in language, eccentricity at its best where ‘there’s a profusion of presents.’ This book makes eye contact with she and with me. It reminds me how being a reader can be exciting.”
— Nicole Brossard
QUOTES OF NOTE
The Empress Has No ClosureAll of it hums with intellectual energy, much of it is even funny.
— Books in Canada
An impressive deconstruction of language and meaning…
— Canadian Literature
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program; and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing activities.