A moving new collection from award-winning poet, novelist, critic, and creative-writing instructor Margaret Christakos, charger considers the plugged-in self fuelled by the technologies that deliver us to each other. A deeply humane poetic cycle in twelve sections, charger grapples with the complicated currents that course between private and social, between mortal and virtual, and between estrangement and belonging to the natural world amid our fallacies of unlimited sustainability. With notes of memory and mourning for those we love and lose, this poetry contemplates how we resuscitate each other amid the speeding electronic webscapes now so common to our social conduct.

Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. Born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario, she has worked as a poet, writer, editor, instructor, and poetry-culture builder in Toronto since the late 1980s. Her body of work includes nine collections of poetry, numerous chapbooks, a novel, and an inter-genre memoir. She has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and is a recipient of the ReLit Award for poetry and the Bliss Carman Award. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos was published in 2017 (Laurier Poetry series). She has held appointments as Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University, London Public Library, and the University of Alberta. She is associate faculty with the MFA program in creative writing at University of Guelph-Humber and has taught widely as a sessional, most recently at Ryerson University. In 2018–2019, she was Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, University of Toronto. She has three adult children and lives in Toronto.

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"charger ... [offers] a through-line both sustained and constantly interrupted, a staccato of reaching and reaching out, disconnecting even as [Christakos] attempts to connect."—rob mclennan

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