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Poetry Canadian

Popular Narratives

by (author) Frank Davey

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Jan 1991
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889222854
    Publish Date
    Jan 1991
    List Price
    $15.95

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Description

This book of prose poems strips down the codes and conventions that make up our society’s “popular narratives.” A revealing and witty, exploded view of our culture.

About the author

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

Editorial Reviews

“Risqué metaphors … scandalously unpoetic … a powerful alternative to the orthodoxy of poetic beauty.”
—Smaro Kamboureli