Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more.
Gregory Betts’ introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life — including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country’s leading feminist authors and thinkers — with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it.
In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.

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

GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts and response-text writing. If Language presents paragraph-length anagrams that explore the formation of meaning within a recombinant linguistic system. Haikube was part of a collaborative art project with sculptors Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel in which six of Betts's poems were carved into an ebony movable (a la Rubiks) cube. The text was carved in negative relief, which allowed the cube to function as a press block to print new poems as they were 'discovered' by moving the sides of the cube. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.

Gregory Betts' profile page