This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic-saturated world we are enmeshed in. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended tweets, each section infuses itself with continuously shifting tones, styles, and commentary which in turn are provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up 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 shards and fragments of post-consumerist culture.

Adeena Karasick’s fourth book of poetry achieves an astonishing layered complexity and maturity. Dyssemia Sleaze is at one and the same time Karasick’s most political and most personal book to date. Its performance is that of an inter-folded language, woven (shuffled) back and forth between the perpetual absence of intimations of the thing itself and the rupture of the ever-present metamorphoses of its mediation. This tapestry of syntax, the fitting of one word to another, becomes a triumph, in this book, of the feminine sensibility over the linear, masculine, causal narrative (what used to be called ‘naive realism’). It is the feminine soul crying at the ‘Mehitzah,’ the wall that separates the male and female worshipers in the Jewish temple. It is the woman at the temple screen, impervious to anything but language, as the current post-modern heir to authenticity. This is a book of walls: defensive walls that keep people out-the garrison; and inclusive walls that keep people in-paradise. And it is a book of transgression-of messengers, both voluntary and mercenary, who pass and carry the notes and letters, both living and dead, between those who are without and those who are within those walls. At times, Karasick’s language becomes the veritable milk of life: you, the reader, the child of innocence, get whatever “mama’s eaten that day,” both “itself,” and “itself mediated,” always unpredictably. The very sensuality of its presentational style (full colour image-text collage) is at one and the same time in dire conflict with the complex austerity of its exegesis-the heartbreak of recognition illustrated in the mirror of desire. Knowing here (her) is always the illusion of the illustration of the object of desire: certainty is a fetish of bondage; knowing the opening of the mouth (wound) of the tear into substance. And the laughter, that dangerous laughter.

The House That Hijack Built explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of “logical” or normative semantic patterns. If “to hijack” is “to steal in transit,” this text focuses on how language, with its idioms and ideologies, is appropriated―hijacked and transported―to unknown destinations in the act of its transmission. In her fifth collection of poems / collages, Karasick explores the intersection between das Wahre (the true) and die Wahrheit (the truth), as a language at war with itself re-presents a “real world” reworded between narrations of “the real”―inscribed in ruptures, betrayals and unfulfilled promises―and speaks to a ‘real world’ that wreaks havoc with the very truth it seeks to inhabit. Included in this collection is a homolinguistic “trans’elation” of the first chapter of the Sefer Yetzirah. Known as The Book of Creation or The Book of the Letters, it is the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabalistic texts, dating back to 100 BCE. Its focus is on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet―how they were formed, how they inter-relate, how they make meaning―the text itself inscribed through slippage, elision, rupture and undecideability, foregrounding language as a continuum of letters, names, mathematical equations and gates of meaning. By a technique of slight displacement, slipping one word under another, Karasick mimics Nietzsche’s Geschichte Eines Irrtums History of an Error, announcing the narration of a fabrication: how the “true world” finally becomes a fable.

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.

"Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces - concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms - that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection. The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture. As a euphoric parade of "alternative facts" or "fake news," "Checking In" offers satiric comment on the state of American politics. Each ironically investigative line erupts as a self-reflexive mash-up, speaking to our seemingly insatiable desire for information while acknowledging how fraught that information can be. The Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. We seek fulfillment but enter an unsettling, uninhibited flow of information in which every data point refers to itself and reinforces a techno-capitalist culture. Checking In founds a site of radical, grafted linkages, codes, indices, ludic identities. An interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, analyses, echoes, and provocations, (re)presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities, its poems are inter-subjective theatres of infinite re-framing. From Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants to bill bissett and Slavoj i̓ ek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In tours the shards of post-consumerist culture and reminds us we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us, and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking ̥Karasick's words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer's concoctions; as ever, they're fun, smart, and topical. With full-colour Vispo video stills by Jim Andrews."--

"Marked by a playful 'cognitive dissidence' and a lyrically and visually explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations is Karasick's 12th volume of poetry. Through a poetics of politically engaged aesthetic resistance, this work negotiates turbulence, loss, nostalgia and hope, inscribing a prescient 'present' ever-arriving through jubilation and bereavement, in immanence and irruption"--Page 4 of cover.

An ecstatically wrought, never quite post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings. Inscribing what Levinas might call "espace vital" (the space we can survive), OUVERT OEUVRE: OPENINGS is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings. Written by Adeena Karasick and visualized by Warren Lehrer, the two poems track the pain of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. They explore a range of intralingual etymologies of the word opening, laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. The poems foreground language as an organism of hope--highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light. This book is the first collaboration between poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist Adeena Karasick, and pioneer designer/author and vis lit practitioner Warren Lehrer. The poems, written by Karasick, speak-sing to re-entering the world after a long period in quarantine. Lehrer choreographs Karasick's words on the stage of the page and through the pages of this volume. His typographic compositions give form to the interior, emotional, metaphorical, historical and performative underpinnings of the poems. Together, the writing and visuals create a new whole that engages the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the poems."A twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature syllabic labyrinth."--Craig Dworkin"Karasick's poetry jolts and challenges us out of our notion of what poetry is, or could be."--Tablet"In Lehrer's books, words take on thought's very form, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow." --The New York Times Book ReviewPoetry. Hybrid. Art. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies.

Adeena Karasick's third book of poems provides the reader with an experience akin to a roman candle going off in the dark night of your soul. Palimpsesting Hitler and Derrida with The Violent Femmes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show , images from consumer advertising and the cartoons of Gary Larson, Genrecide explores the intersection of multiple cultures, codes, idioms and constructs that impact on the social construction of female identity. An extended and extensive play and pun on shifting perceptions and language, it provides a glimpse of the very origins of new possibilities of the spoken word.

Poetry. "Tucked in torque wick slick/ serial surface like chic smut fluff/ my foolie fois glas grammars flummoxed/ in the festering folly. And i, zip my/ salience sexing my/ shimmy-shimmy sassy flagrance/ flounced with rotting fissures/ in aplomb puffery, stigmata fat lattice souflee/ riffin' in the filly fallow filters,/ famine laminate filaments,/ in the neolyric acrylic frill fandango-" - from I.