The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is 'a public organ of private damage.' The poems in Excessive Love Prostheses confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual.

Excessive Love Prostheses takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker's Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.

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.

Margaret Christakos' profile page