Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions demonstrates how seductive everyday wordsÑthose euphemisms and new 'expressions'Ñ often mean more than we think they do: how when we speak them we can be tricked into saying more than we've meant to say. In these mischievous poems about mischievously charming language, Davey shows us how words can be more nimble than we are ourselves, how they take us places we may not have wanted to go, and how likely it is that you've already been there.

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

Frank Davey's profile page