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This Poem

By Adeena Karasick

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomedia-saturated world in which we are enmeshed. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended Tweets, each section infuses itself with continuous shifting tones, styles, and commentary, which are in turn provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric.

Mashing up the lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, the recent financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through the fragments of post-consumerist culture. Both celebrating and poking fun at contradictory trends, threads, webbed networks of information and desire, and the language of the “ordinary,” it opens itself with immediacy to the otherness of daily carnage.

This Poem interrogates the tradition of the Canadian long poem, systematically and systemically accusing it of being a multi-platform interdisciplinary repository, an archive of fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatises, advice, precepts, echoes and questions, unravelling into itself, in an ever-enfolding, luminous text of concomitance.

Karasick’s serial poem textually proceeds in the tradition of such poets as George Oppen, bpNichol, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer.

ISBN 13: 9780889226999 | ISBN 10: 889226997
5.75 W x 8.75 H inches | 112 pages
$19.95 CAN / $19.95 US
Rights: World
Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: POE011000
Paperback Edition

QUOTES OF NOTE

“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

About the Contributors

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”. Karasick is a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series and is the winner of the MPS Mobile Award recognizing her as being the world’s first “Mobile Poet”.

> Go to biography…