Zip's File: A Romance of Silence explores the longings and limits of bodies oriented to wacky shared futures—of language, of social formations, of gene editing—with the heart of a surrealist, the obsession of a medievalist, and the erotic frankness of a riot grrl, the narrative impulse of a web-surfer, and the anarchic glee of a futurist. From the Egyptian Pyramid texts to Heldris de Cornuälle's thirteenth century Le Roman de Silence, to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew to Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World to Guillaume Apollinaire's Les mamelles de Tirésias to Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragements, and many besides, past texts are wryly ripped, rubbed, and reimagined—all in the species-bending mad-cap adventures of Zip/Zoe and their ornithologist partner, Desiree Gordon.

This is an epic romance told in fragments of journals, performance texts, interviews, short prose, imagist inspired poetry and other documents.

Shannon Maguire is a non-binary writer and editor. The author of two full-length poetry collections, fur(l) parachute (2013)--shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry--and Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina (2015), Shannon's poetry has been also shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems. Shannon has also published four chapbooks, the most recent of which, As An Eel Through the Body (2016) is a bilingual Finnish/English collaboration with Helsinki-based writer and literary scholar, Vappu Kannas. Shannon edited and wrote the critical introduction to Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (2017). With Lesley Belleau, Shannon is the guest co-editor of the Winter 2017 special issue of Contemporary Verse 2 on Northern Ontarian Innovative and Indigenous Poetics. Shannon lives in Calgary where she is an Assistant Professor (LTA) in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

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