Lazy Bastardism

‘If grown-ups don’t read poetry’, writes poet and critic Carmine Starnino, ‘it’s not because they have a bone to pick with poets. The truth is even more intolerable: they prefer not to. . . They’re just not that into us.’ In his latest collection of critical essays, Starnino reports on the state of poetry with his usual sleeves-rolled-up approach to literary criticism which synthesizes broad observation with close reading. Engaging both icons (Atwood, Birney, McKay, Moritz, bpNichol) and lesser-knowns (James Denoon, Anne Szumigalski, Peter Trower), Starnino writes with the style, wit and intensity of a poet-critic, offering confident, intelligent candour where we have too often settled for ‘bland, much-recycled truisms’.

AUTHOR

Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino has published five collections of poetry, including This Way Out, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 2009 and recently translated into French by Éditions Hashtag under the title Par Ici La Sortie. His most recent collection is Leviathan. His other books include The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry and Lazy Bastardism, a collection of essays on contemporary poetry. He has received numerous awards, including the CAA Prize for Poetry, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and the F.G. Bressani Prize, in addition to being shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Prize for the best first book of poetry. He lives in Montreal with his wife and three children.