Eschewing prevailing poetic fashion, Sooner reimagines poetry as a kind of cubist fascination, at times even a fascination with fascination itself.

In Sooner, Christakos’s most tender, lucent book to date, we find the delusory spiral reasoning of artistic schools; the fluid politic of desire, gender and domesticity; the recurrent trials of revulsion and arousal – all shined through Christakos’s unique prismatic style to emerge in new, striking and often dissonant syntaxes.

This is the music of a keenly tuned mind listening to all of its stations at once, a poetry of menace and possibility, clear sight and ambiguity, love and darkness, jealousy and light. If to know is to feel precisely, as another poet once suggested, Christakos makes it clear the opposite may be just as true, and that the devil is still in the details: You don’t know what you think or feel. You only think and feel you know, and wave from the window…

Praise for Christakos’s last book, Excessive Love Prostheses:

‘[It] begs the question, Is Margaret Christakos the love child of David Cronenberg and the queen of the confessional poets, Sharon Olds? … Much of this writing shocks for its originality.’

– Georgia Straight

‘Beautifully restrained poetry shot through with sardonic humour and rendered even more interesting by Christakos’s seriously playful manipulations of language.’

– Calgary Herald

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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