Wipe Under a Love

Margaret Christakos’ fourth poetry collection playfully filters the refrains of domestic experience through an ever-shifting procedural sieve, rendering a series of ground-out texts which lift the vernacular to the plane of exuberant bliss. A woman’s kaleidoscopic self-image emerges where memory and culture double back on each other amidst the practical realities of needing to leave the scene of mothering in order to write at all. The lover within the mother is invited throughout to speak and deliver herself through a series of impassioned memoirs to an exhilerating and complex embrace of the present.

AUTHOR

Margaret Christakos

MARGARET CHRISTAKOS is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work includes the afterword for the Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal 2021 finalist, Permanent Revolutions, and the essay collection, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex, Blood, Loss & Selfies. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004–2005, served as Canada Council Writer in Residence at Western University in 2016–2017 and at the University of Alberta in 2017–2018, and as Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto (2018–2019).

Reviews

Christakos’ poems process collage in all its meanings, revamping the sexual: the personal and language’s lurid tryst and performance. These poems are something else. Becomingly so, they evade random sampling as meaning; they have their own forceful wonder, impact behind the eyes.Ó (Arc)