Joy Is So Exhausting

By (author): Susan Holbrook

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook’s poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere – home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca – in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure.

AUTHOR

Susan Holbrook

Edited by Susan Holbrook and Dawn Marie Kresan. Holbrook teaches North American Literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, and is the current poetry editor for The Windsor Review. Her poetry books include the Trillium-nominated Joy Is So Exhausting (2009), the chapbook Good Egg Bad Seed (2004), and misled (1999), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Kresan lives in Kingsville, where she works as a freelance graphic designer and the publisher of Palimpsest Press. Her poetry books include Muse (2013) and a limited edition chapbook Framed (2009).

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Details

Dimensions:

88 Pages
7.52in * 5.88in * 0.3in
0.31lb

Published:

October 15, 2009

Publisher:

Coach House Books

ISBN:

9781552452226

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

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Language:

eng

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