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Poetry. From poet-provocateur Moez Surani comes OPERATIONS--a book-length poetic inventory of contemporary rhetoric of violence and aggression, as depicted through the evolution of the language used to name the many military operations conducted by UN Member Nations since the organization's inception in 1945.
With OPERATIONS, Surani draws from two poetic traditions--conceptual poetry, with its appropriation and filtration of language and its methodological focus on establishing rigorous constraints from which poems develop and emerge; and inventory poems that aggregate small parts into larger, inferred meanings. In so doing, he achieves two important aims: On the one hand, he shows that no word is free from connoting violence--where "tulip" and "grasshopper" are equal to "killer" and "bone breaker," no word is inherently innocent, beautiful, or good. On the other hand, he provokes people to consider whether their personal values match the values of the military operations that are conducted by their countries, often in the name of protecting and/or representing those same citizens.
By pulling military language away from euphemism--effectively, making it account for its doublespeaking ways--OPERATIONS documents the chasm that exists between these two sets of values, and gives voice to the many lives lost in conflicts around the world, in a volume that will speak equally to lovers of contemporary poetry, language, and linguistics, as to readers interested in politics, international relations, and public discourse.
"Words, first, then evidently turning into names, but names of what? Racking up four thousand military operations by United Nations member states since 1945, Moez Surani's list is far from simple. Who knew that the UN was writing a long poem? Or that this particular long poem would resound in the
About the author
Moez Surani has travelled, studied, and worked in countries around the world. His writing has been featured in numerous publications, including the
Best Canadian Poetry (2013 and 2014),
The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Harper's Magazine, and
PRISM International. His first poetry collection,
Reticent Bodies (Wolsak and Wynn), was published in 2009. In that same year, he won a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and later, attended artists' residencies in Italy, Finland, Latvia, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Canada. His second poetry collection,
Floating Life (Wolsak and Wynn), was published in 2012. OPERATIONS (BookThug, 2016), Surani's third book, was a finalist for 2014 Les Figues Press Book Prize.
