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Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Essays. Women's Studies. HER PARAPHERNALIA, the new book of creative non-fiction from Canadian poet Margaret Christakos, presents an intimate and original collection of midlife writings that seeks to make readers think in a very personalized way about family geneology, private sexuality and life changes, including those experiences that exist at the intersections of contemporary digital culture.
Christakos's virtuosity with language and wordplay tantalizes through a sequence of ten etudes (consisting of entre-genre pieces, including prose and lyric poetry, experimental writing that integrates elements of social media posts, and other forms) that explore women's and girls' relationships to self-portraiture in the Digital Age, and considers aspects of how we negotiate our public and private identities as women, mothers, and daughters.
Christakos wrote HER PARAPHERNALIA as a love song to her mother and daughter. As such, the collection is at once a personal and yet wholly personable entree into major themes that many people of all ages and stages can relate to--self-identity, the beauty of the selfie, partnership, divorce, miscarriage, menstruation, sexual lust, solo travel, depression, menopause, the death of a parent, the writing life, and women's transgenerational vitality, among others.
"Easily one of our most daring, consistently inventive and deeply engaged contemporary Canadian poets."--rob mclennan
"In Christakos's work the public and private are emphatically not separate. Multitudes provides readers with a poetics well tuned to rearticulate an insistently present tense."--Jason Weins
About the author
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).
