Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run from the allegorical barricades of the baroque to the topological confound of the modern, incorporating (for example) Medusa and the Sphinx, aestivating snails and the alchemy of bees. Lush and extravagant, this is writing tuned in to the terrestrial spectacle.

David Dowker was born in Kingston, Ontario but has lived most of his life in Toronto. He was the editor of The Alterran Poetry Assemblage, and his first book, Machine Language, was published in 2010. Christine Stewart lives on the North Saskatchewan River. She works at the University of Alberta and the Learning Centre in downtown Edmonton. Publications include from Taxonomy, Pessoa's July: or the months of astonishments and The Trees of Periphery. The Humanist is forthcoming from Red Nettle Press.

David Dowker's profile page

Christine Stewart is an Associate Professor in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. She studies poetics, and is a founding member of the Writing Revolution in Place Research Collective. Recent publications include “Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge” in Sustaining the West (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015); “On Treaty Six, under the Mill Creek Bridge” in Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press, 2015); “This—from Treaty Six” in Dusie; and The Odes (Nomados Press, 2016; shortlisted for the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award).

Christine Stewart's profile page

"Analogy—this word held in disrepute by the philosophers of the Enlightenment for its lack of rigor and reliability—ensconced, like metaphor, in the vast territory of that which is improper, now revealed itself to be, for Baudelaire, the only key with which to access that knowledge 'which sheds a magical and supernatural light on the natural obscurity of things.'" —Roberto Calasso, trans. Alastair McEwen, La Folie Baudelaire