My Beloved Wager
by Erin Moure
Find at your local bookstore
978-1-897126-25-5 | 2009 September | 352 Pages
ABOUT THIS BOOK
- Shortlisted for Best Book Design at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards
Edited by Smaro Kamboureli, My Beloved Wager gathers essays by noted poet and translator Erín Moure, and records a quarter century of writing practice emerging from a city of exhilarating poetic and translatory possibility: Montreal. In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.
Moure was recently described as one of the 10 best English-language poets in Canada by the CBC's Barbara Carey, who refers her as “one of our best — and most audacious — at expanding the possibilities of language.”
“My Beloved Wager offers us a feast of exciting essays, ranging from such provocative theoretical pieces as 'The Anti-Anaesthetic,' to hilarious send-ups like 'Poets Amid the Management Gurus,' to trenchant analyses of Fernando Pessoa and of medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, and even a set of 'concrete' prose meditations. Throughout this dazzling collection, Moure displays an astonishing familiarity with French poststructuralist theory—beautifully adapted to her purposes—coupled with a highly original sense of the poet’s aesthetic and cultural role at this juncture of history.”
~ Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature
“The pleasures of My Beloved Wager? Many. An outspoken, must-read book of generous, faceted essays about a writing, reading, and thinking practice. A brave, open-hearted book of literary plenitude and theoretical intelligence about the precisions of the somatic, about elations of translation, about transitioning nations, about the lope across borders, about sexualities and genders. Moure’s collection of essays and commentaries offers a responsive, penetrating, and alert justification for the arts of poetry and translation as radical practices of form, content, sound, ideology—and being. Erín Moure, Canadian, also carries the passport of a dazzling country: the Democratic Network of Languages.”
~ Rachel Blau DuPlessis, feminist literary critic and poet
"My Beloved Wager is like an intellectual dance through Erin Moure’s three-decade (thus far) career as a writer and translator."
~ January Magazine
"Exhilarating! Moure's 'beloved wager' is on the possibilities offered by books: the opportunity at every page to be changed by language and have the world created anew. To read this book is to gamble on one writer's belief in the importance of words. It's a pretty solid bet."
~ Anna Leventhal, Montreal Review
"Moure’s essays expand her poetry’s philosophical and erotic dance of negotiated presence.... Don’t miss out on this ever more timely volume."
~ Caroline Bergvall, The Brooklyn Rail
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