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Poetry Canadian

Croak

by (author) Jenny Sampirisi

Publisher
Coach House Books
Initial publish date
Oct 2011
Category
Canadian, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781552452509
    Publish Date
    Oct 2011
    List Price
    $17.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781770563018
    Publish Date
    Sep 2011
    List Price
    $10.95

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Description

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons, all set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J. with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculations, Sampirisi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.

 

In conversation with Samuel Beckett's Words & Music , Croak presents a negotiation between the doom and gloom of a species in crisis and the many empirical markers we attach to such creatures. Sampirisi reminds us that we are all porous in the mud of language.

About the author

Jenny Sampirisi is the author of the novel is/was from Insomniac Press. She is the Managing Editor of BookThug where she also edits the Department of Narrative Studies imprint, which focuses on innovative prose. She is co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing, a series of reading and writing workshops designed and facilitated by working writers. She teaches English Literature and Composition at Ryerson University. Croak is her “rst poetry collection.

Jenny Sampirisi's profile page

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