My Beloved Wager gathers essays by noted poet and translator Erín Moure, and records a quarter century of writing practice emerging from a city of exhilarating poetic and translatory possibility: Montreal. In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as a way of life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erin Moure's profile page

Smaro Kamboureli is Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph. Her publications include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize, and, with Roy Miki, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2007). She is currently completing a new edition of her anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature.

Robert Zacharias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests include migration literature, Canadian literature (with a focus on Mennonite literature), 18th-century studies, and critical pedagogy. His work has been published in Mosaic and Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in the edited collections Embracing Otherness and Narratives of Citizenship.

Smaro Kamboureli's profile page

"In keeping with a Montaignian definition, Erin Mouré's My Beloved Wager offers us a feast of exciting essays, ranging from such provocative theoretical pieces as "The Anti-Anaesthetic," to hilarious send-ups like "Poets and Management Gurus," to trenchant analyses of Fernando Pessoa and of medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, and even a set of "concrete" prose meditations. Throughout this dazzling collection, Moure displays an astonishing familiarity with French poststructuralist theory-beautifully adapted to her purposes-coupled with a highly original sense of the poet's aesthetic and cultural role at this juncture of history." -Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature
"The pleasures of My Beloved Wager? Many. An outspoken, must-read book of generous, faceted essays about a writing, reading, and thinking practice. A brave, open-hearted book of literary plenitude and theoretical intelligence about the precisions of the somatic, about elations of translation, about transitioning nations, about the lope across borders, about sexualities and genders. Moure's collection of essays and commentaries offers a responsive, penetrating, and alert justification for the arts of poetry and translation as radical practices of form, content, sound, ideology-and being. Erín Moure, Canadian, also carries the passport of a dazzling country: the Democratic Network of Languages." -Rachel Blau DuPlessis, feminist literary critic and poet