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    ISBN: 9780889223448 | Paperback

    120 pages | Pub. Date: 19940101
    6.00 W × 9.00 H × 0.30000000000000004 D inches
    Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: POE011000
    Rights: WORLD

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Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity—the capitalist vision of literary originality, where ownership is of prime value.

As a book that calls into question beginnings and ends, Mêmewars has no closure and no “back” cover; six individual texts work from two separate beginnings: they clash in the “middle”—an unstable and shifting “centre.” However through a self-reflexive practice of authorization, intention is delegitimized as the centre-piece decentres, and becomes yet another beginning.

Short-listed 1995 BC Book Prize: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

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

“[Karasick] enacts language in a concrete way, so that it becomes a sort of golem figure she has animated through the sacred words.”
Canadian Literature

By Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick is a New York–based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard). The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Read more about Adeena Karasick