This volume brings together selections from Karen Mac Cormack’s poetry publications 1984-2009: Nothing by Mouth, Straw Cupid, Quill Driver, Quirks & Quillets, Marine Snow, The Tongue Moves Talk, At Issue and Vanity Release. Also included are previously uncollected poems and a selection of new work. Some of the earlier poems appear inrevised form.

Born in Luanshya, Zambia, Karen Mac Cormack’s most recent book is the polybiography Implexures (Complete Edition), published by Chax Press and West House Books in 2008. Her poetry appears in various national and international anthologies including Prismatic Publics, Another Language, and Out of Everywhere. Her work is also the subject of numerous essays, most recently in Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (2008). Selections of her poetry have been translated into French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Norwegian. A resident of Toronto for many years she currently lives in the USA where she teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

No one writing in North America today can match Karen Mac Cormack’s exquisite poise, the integrity of her poetic line, her command of verbal nuance, pun, and paragram. – Marjorie Perloff

ISBN 9781897388549; 6x9; 196 pages
MARCH 2010 Co-Published with West House Books (UK)