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.

"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."--

"A collection of poems and musings explore the bizarre side of Mother Nature's handiwork, from the depths of the ocean to the wilds of tropical rainforest, to the cozy hearth of the domesticated housecat. The idiosyncratic observations and provocative musings illuminate an unseen world of creatures both real and imagined."--

Book by Michaels, Anne

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.

Roger Nash has the ability to discover the magical qualities of ordinary objects and actions. In Night Flying, his third collection of poems, things are not always what they seem. Women become windows, a paddle "recovers slowly from the numbness of its wooden limb," deep lake water is "a suddenly dilated passive black pupil." These lyrical poems portray a world where inanimate objects are given life, and where the barriers between life and death are sometimes imperceptible.

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.

"The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany."--

Stuart Ross's eighth collection of poems delivers a gallery of emotionally charged poetry experiments along with a series of philosophical meditations on the aesthetically contrived and sometimes downright quirky poetic processes that were followed to generate the poems in this book. A Hamburger in a Gallery is deeply engaged in demonstrating how art happens, especially through a poet's immediate aesthetic engagement with other works of art. Comprised of poems written 'after' the lines and language of other artists' works, 'during' sessions of listening to other poets reading their poems, or constructed 'from' the parts and pieces of other artists' words, A Hamburger in a Gallery provides a distinctive experience of the relationship between the finished poem and the process that informed its creation. Blurring the boundaries between creative writing and creative reading, Ross has once again created an utterly original, accessible, moving and avant-garde classic. 'Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry.' George Murray, The Globe & Mail

Zigzags , a collection of Nash's latest poetry, explores how virtually none of our thoughts, actions or feelings go very far without becoming paradoxes and contradictions. Some paradoxes are humourous, but some are deadly. The poems debunk an intellectualism that pretends we can strategize straight lines of progress to our goals. Rather, "Life's walking a straight zigzag, while standing upright in a somersault" (Irish saying). Zigzags replaces this intellectualism with a vision of life and ourselves expressed in the harmonizing metaphors of poetry.

"Eclectic poems wherein the author makes unapologetic leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd"--

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language.

In the pages of Gary Barwin's latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world. Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us - that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of "nature" and "the animal." As philosophical as it is entertaining - weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more - No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.

Book by Rosenblatt, Joe