Overview

When asked the question ""what is the power of poetry?,"" writer Ian Williams said ""poetry punctures the surface."" Williams' statement—that poetry matters and that it does something—is at the heart of this book. Building from this core idea that poetry perforates the everyday to give greater range to our lives and our thinking, the practical and pedagogical aim of this book is twofold: the first aim is to provide students with an introduction to the key cultural, political, and historical events that inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian poetry; and to familiarize those same readers with poetic movements, trends, and forms of the same time period. This book addresses the aesthetic and social contexts of Canadian poetry written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: it models for its readers the critical and theoretical discourses needed to understand the contexts of literary production in Canada. Put differently, readers need a sense of the ""where"" and ""how"" of poetic production to help situate them in the ""what"" of poetry itself. In addition to offering a historically contextualized overview of the significant movements, developments, and poets of this time period, this book also familiarizes readers with key moments of reflection and rupture, such as the effects of economic and ecological crisis, global conflicts, and debates around appropriation of culture. This book is built on the premise that poetry in Canada does not happen outside of political, social, and cultural contexts.

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9780367371661

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Erin Wunker is an associate professor of Canadian literature at Dalhousie University, which is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq Peoples. Her areas of research and teaching include Canadian poetry and poetics, feminist and affect theory, and creative non-fiction with a focus on the personal essay and autotheory. She is the author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (2016). With Sina Queyras and Geneviève Robichaud she edited Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (2020). With Hannah McGregor and Julie Rak she edited Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (2018). With Bart Vautour, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn she edited Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics (2015). She is currently working on a creative non-fiction project about boredom, anxiety, and care work.

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