Books
Since 1989, at intervals of 3-4 years, my new book projects have been published in Canada and distributed internationally. My publishers, designers and editors represent some of the most brilliant of the Canadian literary press, and I am grateful for their generosity and vision. There are several chapbooks, as well, following on the Books, created through the experimental energies of terrific micropresses.
New Book!
That Audible Slippage
That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Many of the poems try to hold spaces for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard. This intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace.
University of Alberta Press, 2024
“For maximum benefit, read That Audible Slippage out loud, and you will hear the whirr of birds, the click of Facebook posts, and a radical mind awake to its own listenings and jostlings within the rivers of the body and the body of the world. However you read this book, you will feel yourself hearing anew. “ — Ronna Bloom
“Within That Audible Slippage each measure of the text invites a deeper hearing, in an entrancing dance of sounds vividly musical and politically astute. Twinned ironic anchors of popular culture and natural silence yield by turns whispers, yells, and experience.”
— Sheila Murphy
Dear Birch,
“Attachment is the puzzle.”
Three years after her mother’s death and on the brink of a break up, a bisexual writer sits in the company of an urban birch tree, auditing the odds of new loves entering her future. So begins Dear Birch, an intimate poem cycle that improvises within the permutability of grief, wind, reading, refusal and desire, listening for an ethos of ongoingness. Synthesizing memoir, votive and epistle, Margaret Christakos displays her trademark fidelity to writing as attentive process, imbuing her work with the polyamory of tender intelligence.
Palimpsest Press, 2021.
Longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Watch a reading from the book:
https://youtu.be/aUgz77-_GC4
Read a review by rob mcclennan:
https://palimpsestpress.ca/2021/06/review-margaret-christakos-dear-birch/
Listen to a podcast interview: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/all-write-in-sin/attached-to-the-earth-a-qNXvm1CDgGs/
Watch a Round Table on Dear Birch,: https://youtu.be/P-M4m3dV2YM
charger
A moving new collection from award-winning poet, novelist, critic, and creative-writing instructor Margaret Christakos, charger considers the plugged-in self fuelled by the technologies that deliver us to each other. A deeply humane poetic cycle in twelve sections, charger grapples with the complicated currents that course between private and social, between mortal and virtual, and between estrangement and belonging to the natural world amid our fallacies of unlimited sustainability. With notes of memory and mourning for those we love and lose, this poetry contemplates how we resuscitate each other amid the speeding electronic webscapes now so common to our social conduct.
Talon Books, 2020
On charger:
rob mclennan: “The lyric cycle charger is built as a cascade, even a pulse, of fragments that ebb and flow across the page to write on connection and disconnect;… In charger, [Christakos’s] lyric staccato is stretched out, pulled apart and allowed the space to breathe… The intimacies of her approach continue… across the spectrum of social media and how that alters the ways in which connections are made, seeking out the point where human considerations might concurrently scatter, fractal and meet.”
https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2020/DiscoverVerse-Margaret-Christakos-charger#topofpostcontent
Watch a reading from the book:
launch — https://youtu.be/aKNzRlCVjzA
charger 12 — https://youtu.be/cyWWW0PyJ3Q
Space Between Her Lips:
The Poetry of Margaret Christakos
Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more.
Gregory Betts’ introduction to the collection highlights Christakos’s formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017
Her Paraphernalia
How does a contemporary woman write a life’s umbilical attachments to the lives around her, lives formed in and by other histories and times, relations living and dying and dead? How does she see what remains her own, despite midlife’s losses? Formed of ten intimate études that move from considerations of mothering, sex and photography to settler bloodlines, erasure and divorce, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies profoundly embodies the feelings of living as a woman and a mother in all its tumult and precocity and promise. At once daring, erotic and original, Her Paraphernalia explores the beauty of the selfie, menopause, daughters, lust, solo travel, depression, the death of a parent, the writing life and women’s transgenerational vitality, among other interwoven themes.
Bookhug, 2016
On Her Paraphernalia:
See “The Lucky Seven Interview”—http://open-book.ca/News/The-Lucky-Seven-Interview-with-Margaret-Christakos
Julie Joosten: “Speaking as the editor of this book, one of the things I most love about Her Paraphernalia is the book’s intimacy with risk, its willingness not only to take risks but also to inhabit risk, on the levels of form, sound, time, history, and self-exposure.”
http://towncrier.puritan-magazine.com/her-paraphernalia/
Vagabond City, 2016: “If you’re looking for an honest, beautifully written read about love, loss, familial relationships and everything in between, look no further than Her Paraphernalia. Christakos opens the book with a definition of paraphernalia as “property owned by a married woman apart from her dowry, for example her own things,” and what we find beyond this introductory page is a detailed account of what is entirely, uniquely, solely hers.”
Watch a reading from the book:
https://youtu.be/JRAZYxEHXp0
Multitudes
Multitudes is a moving, witty, poetic foray into a modern frontier of public spaces, poetic forms, private longings and virtual relocations. With her trademark linguistic sonar, Christakos amplifies the capacity of language to discern an almost inherent swingdoor between 'moaning' and 'meaning,' while casting a discouraged eye on how human discernment is used to rigidify recognitions, inviting citizens to turn from ethical social activism to snitch on their Facebook friends after an urban hockey riot.
Coach House Books, 2013
On Multitudes:
“Starred review: Multitudes.” Quill & Quire Jason Wiens. Dec 2013: “…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.”
“Imagine if Whitman knew about Facebook.” Winnipeg Free Press, Jonathan Ball, Oct 26, 2013: “The tension between the new forms of expression that technology allows, and how an increasingly technological culture bleeds from these expressions their political force, enervates her poems.”
“Margaret Christakos, Multitudes.” rob mclennan’s blog, Oct 3, 2013: “…revels in polyvocal syntactic play, utilizing repetition, reorder and the abbreviated language of Twitter to engage a poetry of social spaces, ranging from responses to Jack Layton and Lena Dunham to an engagement with the social and linguistic disconnect of social media itself.…Christakos’ work might be seen by some to be difficult, or about difficulty, but with such playful ease that it becomes impossible to not be swept up in her glorious music. “
https://lemonhound.com/2013/11/22/bronwyn-haslam-on-margaret-christakoss-multitudes/
Welling
Margaret Christakos grew up "with hills, rock, lakes and short cuts" in Sudbury, Ontario, where winter was winter and summer was a fresh water lake called Ramsey. She left her home there on Wellington Heights for Toronto. From youth, to mothering, to writing, for Christakos living's fullness is also, inevitably, disembarking, leaving. "That's how paragraphs go / on the balls of their pink feet directly / into traffic." The movement is a continually sensuous welling--from pink, through purple, to blue. Purple is the colour of narrative, the middle place where the poet's well-honed attention to language and its deliberateness shapes well the pink lyric memory welling up out of the blue shadowy well of what's "in store."
Your Scrivener Press, 2010
On Welling:
“Children of the Revolution.” Stevie Howell, Arc, April 3, 2012 online: “Without a trace of sentimentality, Christakos looks backward, and forward, and shows us what needs to be done, and how to navigate the terrain.”
“The art of living better linguistically,’ Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail “The Daily Review” online. August 30 2010: “The consummate perfectionist's exhaustive attention, everywhere on dazzling display (re-turning to unforgettable — albeit unforgiving — vistas), felicitously recasts her narrator's early years and makes of Welling a journey not unlike Derek Walcott's Another Life or Wordsworth's Prelude... a spectacular achievement enhanced by a formidable talent coming to fruition, contains some of the finest poems to appear in print in recent memory.”
“This Book Can Hold Our Whiskey: A Review of Welling.” E. Martin Nolan, The Puritan, April 2010: “…reaffirms Christakos’ ability to flirt with both chaos and argument while finding space to dance between the two….These are not formalist poems, but the poet has complete control over the rhythm of these lines and the cadences therein. Christakos does not dominate these poems so much as she works with their natural energy and harnesses their power.”
Heather Milne, Canadian Literature, Spring 2011: “These poems engage with temporality, memory, presence and absence, as the poet revisits her past while also foregrounding her present life… [R]ather than simply writing lyric poems, Christakos develops poems that invoke and interrogate lyric voice and poetic language. Christakos is attuned to the scene and process of writing, and to the expectations writers and readers bring to poetic language. [P]erhaps with this text, Christakos will find the wider audience her work deserves.”
A Globe 100 Book.
What Stirs
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.
Coach House Books, 2008
On What Stirs:
“Meredith Quartermain reads “Queen” from What Stirs.” Lemon Hound, Nov 14, 2008: “Christakos adroitly cross-cuts interestingly archaic language (“eyed the silver scissor” “moat” “trounce” “course” “flesh”) with erotic and sensual language (eg. “burns”) as well as startling images. This is Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” revisited with a vengeance.”
“Margaret Christakos: Latches, Hyphens, & Dashes Oh My.” Harriet, The Poetry Foundation. Sina Queyras. April 8, 2010: “…she is a master of the recombinant text, creating bitingly satirical and luminous collages of mostly self-generated, occasionally google-generated, material….One of the powerful forces at work in Christakos is the complicated representations of motherhood and domesticity.”
“Christakos’s contrarian constructions.” Eclectic Ruckus (review blog), Douglas Barbour. Dec 31, 2010: “...a single & singular book, held together by both Christakos’s continuing interests & a subtle redundancy of imagery & reference. What Stirs is a fine addition to her oeuvre.”
Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Sooner
Eschewing prevailing poetic fashion, Sooner reimagines poetry as a kind of cubist fascination, at times even a fascination with fascination itself.
In Sooner, Christakos's most tender, lucent book to date, we find the delusory spiral reasoning of artistic schools; the fluid politic of desire, gender and domesticity; the recurrent trials of revulsion and arousal — all shined through Christakos's unique prismatic style to emerge in new, striking and often dissonant syntaxes.
Coach House Books, 2005
On Sooner:
“Read this: Sooner.” Trish Salah. This Magazine, Mar-Apr 2006: “Under the strobe of a mobile and desiring intelligence, Sooner’s seven segments yield both narrative and jump-cut poetic sequences languaging the world in gorgeously crisp, clipped and recombinant syntax….Sooner is lush and lucid in inscribing the ways being sexed, however variously, orients and inscribes knowing and writing. ”
“Blk, Wht, Read All Over.” Crystal Hurdle. Canadian Literature no. 192, Spring 2007: “Christakos is inventive…disquietude increases in "Lucent," a brilliant, haunting sequence, focusing on a modern-day Prufrock…voyeuristically compelling sequence demands rereading and becomes richer each time…the penultimate section, "Retreat Diary" is mordantly funny with its ungendered subject he/she…a larky exploration of sexual and writerly drives….”
The Underground Book Club, Michael Bryson. July 24, 2009: “I want poetry to be sceptical about its insights and conclusions. But I also want poetry to be something other than another layer of advertising, technical lingo or other form of 21st century linguistic falseness….Recently, therefore, I was pleased to discover Sooner (Coach House Books, 2005) by Margaret Christakos, which reminded me how wise, funny, irritating, insightful, dull, confusing, sexy, marginal, neurotic, blissful and mind-blowing poetry can be.”
Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Excessive Love Prostheses
The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is 'a public organ of private damage.' The poems in Excessive Love Prostheses confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual.
Excessive Love Prostheses takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker's Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.
Coach House Books, 2002
On Excessive Love Prostheses:
The Danforth Review, Jennifer Dales, 2003: “Christakos explores motherhood, hetero- and bi-sexuality, the lives of oddball characters and the struggles of adult life through intense, emotionally alive verse and prose poetry, which she continually turns inside-out and upside-down by repeating fragments of poems in connection with their wholes.”
“Women of Words.” The Globe and Mail, Sonnet L’Abbe, Nov 2, 2002: “The sum of Christakos's work is, in many instances, as formally and conceptually brave as internationally celebrated Montreal poet Anne Carson's; maybe this book will be the one to snap the recognition gods to attention.”
The Georgia Straight, Billeh Nickerson, Sept 2002: “[It] begs the question, Is Margaret Christakos the love child of David Cronenberg and the queen of the confessional poets, Sharon Olds? … Much of this writing shocks for its originality.”
The Calgary Herald, 2002: “Beautifully restrained poetry shot through with sardonic humour and rendered even more interesting by Christakos’s seriously playful manipulations of language.”
Quill & Quire, Patrick Woodcock, July 2002: “Christakos is a talented poet who is capable – as many poems in this collection illustrate – of writing beautifully about even the most tragic of situations.”
“What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Poetics.ca #2, rob mclennan, June 2003: “Christakos’ poems are built like microcircuitry – no matter how close you get, there is still another level of breaking down, of weaving and intricate movement. There are no flat surfaces, or endings here. She knows how to fragment the poem and then widen, scalpel and explore her life, and the language of her life in art, in an increasingly generative series of texts, defining and redefining.”
Winner of the ReLit Award for Poetry.
Charisma
Nominated for the 2001 Trillium Book Award, Charisma is the first novel of celebrated Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. Christakos's work has been called "provocative, original and dazzlingly intelligent." A lush, language-centred novel tracing themes of female subjectivity, mothering and bisexuality.
Pedlar Press, 2000
On Charisma:
Xtra!, Maureen Phillips, 3 May 2001: “Emotional intrigue made poetic,”
“The Poetry of Sex,” The Globe and Mail, Jim Bartley, 3 March 2001.
““Poetic Justice,” NOW Magazine, Susan G. Cole, 18 Jan 2001: “NNNN.”
Quill & Quire, Mary Soderstrom, November 2000: “…an edginess that signals the reader to consider the relationship between violence and passion.”
Shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Book Award.
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 exhilarating and complex embrace of the present.
The Mansfield Press, 2000
On Wipe Under A Love:
Arc, Chris Turnbull, Summer 2002: “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.”
The Fiddlehead (Spring 2001): “wipe.under.a.love should be valued as an extremely careful working out of an experiment; those who love conceptual art will find Christakos’ method provocative and witty.”
The Sudbury Star, Arts Section, Rob O’Flanagan, 2 Sept 2000: “wipe.under.a.love makes us claw at the brain and at the heart, and it has this capacity even though it refuses to our conventional expectations. This certainly says something about Margaret Christakos’ power as a poet.”
The Moment Coming
An elaborate meditation on the challenges to the female self and the long-term partnership of raising a child, this work is a compelling, personal interrogation of both the notion of family and parenting. From the intersection of technology and the lyricism of landscape in “The Seating Place (Not Aided by a Computer),” a poetic cycle written against the backdrop of a Georgian Bay summer that becomes a reckoning with her family of origins and the birth of her first child, to the confrontation of un- and less-spoken struggles in “Bringing You Up,” Christakos charts a new poetic terrain. Over the course of this book, she describes the complex and passionate realm of responsibility and accountability.
ECW, 1998
Other Words for Grace
“Margaret Christakos begins with the particular, the epiphany in the body, and spirals outward into a compelling and honest examination of what it means to be young and female in our culture.”— Lola Lemire Tostevin: "
Mercury Press, 1994
Not Egypt
Not Egypt is a container of a growth process. It introduces a female viewer, not speaker, who loves to “metaphormose,” translating her life in relation to the relations she constructs.
From the all-night margins of bus depots and trains, she sets out to name the intimate realities of her life—childhood, lovers, her identity as an artist—but can define these only as raw material for an “other” site of meaning.
…Eventually, the images combust, revising her as narrator to language, poised.
Coach House Press, 1989.
Acquired for the Press by bpNichol, before his untimely death later in 1988.
On Not Egypt:
Charlene Diehl-Jones, Journal of Canadian Poetry: "... Fascinating indeed... the possibilities of the new geography Christakos introduces... are vital and provocative, and cannot help but impact on feminist writing."
A few chapbooks
with all my heart i heard u speaking. Ice Floe Press, 1991
Retreat Diary. BookThug Press, 2004
from Tumultétudes; The Chips & Ties Study. BookThug Press, 2012
Adult Video. Nomados, 2006
Social Medea Vs. Virtual Medusa. Gap Riot Press, 2017
Retreat Diary 2019. above/ground press, 2019
”This suite of poems pulsates with the vibrant intelligence, music, tactility and sense of being-in-the-world that is characteristic Christakos. The lines are energized and self-aware. We are always/already writing/reading/poeming, retreating and advancing through language. And we communicate and wrestle and dance with communication and the problem/possibility of communication through (social) media, language, received notions of self, our culture and the world.”
—Gary Barwin