Barking & Biting
The Poetry of Sina Queyras
Will be published approx. on 30. March 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
100 pages
978-1-77112-216-0 (ISBN)
Description
This collection brings together representative work from Sina Queyras's poetic oeuvre. Queyras is at the forefront of contemporary discussions of genre, gender, and criticism of poetry. Her influential blog-turned-literary-magazine, Lemon Hound, published up-and-coming writers as well as work by established literary figures in Canada and abroad.
The title, Barking & Biting, makes reference to the tagline of Lemon Hound: ""more bark than bite."" Erin Wunker's introduction situates Queyras's poetry within ongoing debates around genre and gender. It suggests that Queyras's writing, be it literary critical, poetic, or prose, is precise and probing but avoids toothless critical positioning. It pays particular attention to Queyras's poetic innovations and intertextual references to other women writers, and suggests that read together Queyras's oeuvre embodies an engaged feminist attention - what Joan Retallack has called a ""poethics,"" where poetry and ethics are bound together as a mode of inquiry and aesthetics.
Queyras's poems trace a consistent concern with both poetic genealogies and the status of women. Thus far, twenty-first century poetics have been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other non-dominant subjects. While these two topics may seem epistemologically and ethically separate, they are in fact irrevocably intertwined. Questions of form are, at their root, questions of visibility and recognizability. Will the reader know a poem when she sees it? And will that seeing alter her perception of the world? And how is the form of the poem altered, productively or un-, by the identity politics of its author? These are the questions that undergird Queyras's poetry and guide the editorial selections.
Queyras's poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of her poetry collections she inhabits tenets of the traditional lyric but leverages the genre open to let conceptualism in. This is demonstrated in her afterword, ""Lyric Conceptualism, a Manifesto in Progress,"" which was first published on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet the Blog. In it Queyras puts forward a set of maxims about the possibilities of a new hybrid, the conceptual lyric poem.
The title, Barking & Biting, makes reference to the tagline of Lemon Hound: ""more bark than bite."" Erin Wunker's introduction situates Queyras's poetry within ongoing debates around genre and gender. It suggests that Queyras's writing, be it literary critical, poetic, or prose, is precise and probing but avoids toothless critical positioning. It pays particular attention to Queyras's poetic innovations and intertextual references to other women writers, and suggests that read together Queyras's oeuvre embodies an engaged feminist attention - what Joan Retallack has called a ""poethics,"" where poetry and ethics are bound together as a mode of inquiry and aesthetics.
Queyras's poems trace a consistent concern with both poetic genealogies and the status of women. Thus far, twenty-first century poetics have been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other non-dominant subjects. While these two topics may seem epistemologically and ethically separate, they are in fact irrevocably intertwined. Questions of form are, at their root, questions of visibility and recognizability. Will the reader know a poem when she sees it? And will that seeing alter her perception of the world? And how is the form of the poem altered, productively or un-, by the identity politics of its author? These are the questions that undergird Queyras's poetry and guide the editorial selections.
Queyras's poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of her poetry collections she inhabits tenets of the traditional lyric but leverages the genre open to let conceptualism in. This is demonstrated in her afterword, ""Lyric Conceptualism, a Manifesto in Progress,"" which was first published on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet the Blog. In it Queyras puts forward a set of maxims about the possibilities of a new hybrid, the conceptual lyric poem.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
91 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-77112-216-0 (9781771122160)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Sina Queyras is an accomplished poet and essayist. She edited the first anthology of Canadian poetry published by an American press (Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets). Between 2005 and 2007 she co-curated the path-breaking feminist Belladonna* reading series in New York and was instrumental in bringing Canadian and American poets into conversation. She has published six books of poetry and a novel, Autobiography of Childhood (2011). She received the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Lemon Hound (2006). Her most recent book of poetry is MxT (2014).
Erin Wunker is the chair of the board of the national non-profit social justice organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder, writer, and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches Canadian literature and culture at Dalhousie University. Her book The Feminist Killjoy Handbook will be published in the fall of 2016.
Erin Wunker is the chair of the board of the national non-profit social justice organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder, writer, and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches Canadian literature and culture at Dalhousie University. Her book The Feminist Killjoy Handbook will be published in the fall of 2016.