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Poetry. Drawings by David Bateman. How are self-regulating systems such as cities, languages, and ant colonies alike or unalike? What does a medieval love poem have to do with neocolonialism? What politics does interspecies desire entail? How can we escape the trappings of enlightenment and make meaning otherwise? MYRMURS: AN EXPLODED SESTINA explores the connection between medieval texts and textuality, contemporary poetics and politics. In this book, acclaimed Canadian poet Shannon Maguire uses the form of the sestina, a medieval love-poem that follows a set pattern based around six end-words, as a starting point to explore living systems: cities and languages as self- organizing entities; ants; post-human entanglements and attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it. Following on her critically acclaimed, FUR(L) PARACHUTE (published by BookThug in 2013), this second collection in Maguire's planned medievalist trilogy develops a new type of poetic form--"the exploded sestina," borrowing the sestina's pattern of repetition and obsession with the number six, but transforming it into a 39-part network of poems. Beside and around the text are notes or "illuminations" that hint at some of the ways Maguire thinks about self-organization and political and amorous attachments.
About the author
SHANNON MAGUIRE's first collection,
fur(l) parachute, was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her
Fruit Machine was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and "The Fur Parachute Suite" in
CV2 was a finalist for the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems. Maguire's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the
Best American Experimental Writing of 2014,
Jacket2,
Event, among others. Maguire, who has taught Creative Writing at Algoma University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and an MA in English from Brock University.
