The Muse Sings and the poet sings songs of love and longing from states of joy, self-doubt, vexation, curiosity, affection, observation, mock-indignation…

The poems speak for themselves and sometimes “they talk all at once.” In seductive acts of language itself, they invoke and embrace the Muses as much as they do the writers who would become muses, from ancient Homer and Shakespeare to poets of contemporary time.

These poems are the seasoned work of a trickster poet in his prime with a crow’s eye trained on the world. No silent words on the page, these: they are alert, thoughtful, at turns cheeky and saucy. The poems all but produce decibels despite the inked imprint on the page that would fix them silent in place, until a living voice sets them free.

Dennis Cooley grew up in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and attended the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Rochester. He is an active member of the writing community in Winnipeg and teaches at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. His latest book of poetry is the bentleys (2006).

Nicole Markotić is a poet and critic who teaches at the University of Windsor and edits the chapbook publication Wrinkle Press. She has published two poetry books, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, as well as a fictional biography of Alexander Graham Bell, Yellow Pages. She is currently completing a novel.

Dennis Cooley's profile page

• Winner, Manitoba Writers' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award

Praise for Dennis Cooley’s writing:

“Cooley unwinds and unweaves, reknits and retangles but is never at a loss of words.”
– Derek Beaulieu, Calgary Poet Laureate

“Cooley stays alive in his music, the singer, the jester, the dancer in broken lines--he rejects the routine, finds the right found words, and sloughs off the dead language, death itself.”
– Maurice Mierau, author of Autobiographical Fictions

“Mind-bending wordplay and genre-defying experimentation.”
– Jon Paul Fiorentino

[Cooley’s] in fine form here, full of the acrobatic playfulness that has become his trademark. (Indeed, [he] sometimes seems like the only author today who actually enjoys writing.)
–The Winnipeg Free Press