“In keeping with a Montaignian definition, Erin Mouré’s 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 and 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