Shortlisted for the 2009 Pat Lowther Award

Surreptitious breasts of the brain’s inside, crammed with
reptilian lights, uv or incandescent, zoom lens for the purpose of
petalled heights. Sherry-Mary saw him hunkered and hiding, grasping
leapable bells in his greasy palms. Smarmy knots.

Where does the fragile, robust self reside when ‘personal’voice is sent out online into an ironic masquerade ball of alias identity and wanton proxy? What stirs us? Can there be anything authentic about feeling anything anymore?

In What Stirs, Margaret Christakos looks at our primal appetite for attachment through the modern norms of codependency and co-existence, understanding that the postmodern digital era has created an atmosphere where the vulnerability and tenderness of the individual are both profanely exposed and brazenly reinvented with the arrival of virtual identity.

Often playful but never trifling, Christakos’s work layers the ecstatic possibilities of lyric poetry, the mundane and intimate extremes of motherhood, and her continued curiosity with experimental poetics in a thoughtful collection of sensual, language-focused, and wonderfully aural poems. Weighing lyric and anti-lyric inclinations, What Stirs pulls readers toward the music of poetry, and then again pulls them to dissonance, a desire for the otherness of music’s sundering.

Praise for What Stirs:

‘Stirring both emotionally and in a bold experimentalism.’

– Winnipeg Free Press

‘What Stirs is the first poetry book to capture perfectly this bewilderment brought about by the intersection of life and the impact of the Internet, the feeling that thereis a language being spoken that is not communicating what we wish it to … Christakos offers us a ladder out of this tower of Babel by reminding us of human relations of the most intimate and tactile sort … Beautiful and disturbing, poetry naming the world we are creating.’

– The Danforth Review