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Poetry Canadian

Cut Side Down

by (author) Jessi MacEachern

Publisher
Invisible Publishing
Initial publish date
Apr 2025
Category
Canadian, General, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781778430596
    Publish Date
    Apr 2025
    List Price
    $22.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781778430602
    Publish Date
    Apr 2025
    List Price
    $9.99

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Description

Cut Side Down is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books. The title is a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. The poems are collapsing under the weight of influence and the result is a sumptuous, body-and-mind bending landscape. The book is written in three parts, but those parts refuse to remain discrete. In poems that blur the line behind autobiographical lyric and conceptual experiment, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and their many husbands and wives attend the experimental salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman. Lorine Niedecker is in the interactive classroom, scolding Charles Olson. The poet is sometimes perceptible too, as a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, as a young woman in Montréal la retentissante, as an inventor of worlds and words. Ultimately, through being immersed in the reading life of the poet and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down is a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory.

About the author

Jessi MacEachern lives in Montreal, QC, where she teaches English literature. Her research has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Her poetry has been published in various places, including Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, MuseMedusa, Canthius, PRISM, and CV2.

Jessi MacEachern's profile page