Planetary Noise
Selected Poetry of Erín Moure
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure gathers four decades of poetry from a celebrated Canadian poet and translator who has persistently reconfigured the linguistic and material relations of English. Moure’s poems and networked sequences are hybrid and often polylingual; they work with contradiction, paradox, and verbal detritus— linguistic hics and blips often too quickly dismissed as noise—to create new conditions for thought and pleasure. From postdramatic theatre to queer and feminist theory, from the politics of citizenship and genocide to the minutiae of digital poetics, from the clamor of love to the shadows of grief and memory, Moure has joyously toppled hierarchies of meaning and parasited dominant discourses to create poetry that crosses borders, embracing hope, not war. This volume, edited by poet and literary scholar Shannon Maguire, also features an extensive introduction to Moure’s poetry, a section of poetry by others translated by Moure, and an afterword on translation by the poet. An online reader’s companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on four decades of writing by Canadian poet and translator Moure (Kapusta), this rare volume reveals and celebrates the trajectory of her mind. Its success derives from both editor Maguire's astute organization and the depth and generosity of Moure's work. From her early lean lyrics though recent genre-defying poems located at the intersections of archive, performance, and translation, Moure's abiding inquiries into the limits of subjectivity and language continually push into new formal, musical, and intellectual territory. "The writer as witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal bourgeois lie," she writes in an account of a boy hit by a train. Moure's work begins at the limits of language; her poems become multilingual, and then multiauthored. These poems unfold along borders: geopolitical; linguistic; between noise and meaning; between identities real and imagined; and among quoted, translated, and original material. As Moure adopts increasingly intricate premises to trouble the edges of authorship and textuality, her works become difficult to excerpt; by the end, a reader new to Moure may have the feeling of only just scratching the surface. This volume highlights the vast contributions of an important writer whose work should be more widely known in the U.S.
