Poetry. Sheila Murphy is "one of the strongest, clearest, and most distinctive voices writing in English today"--John M. Bennett. CONCENTRICITY is a daring and distinctive book, yet its playfulness never fails to shine through. "Sheila Murphy's poetry operates in mercurial registers that demonstrate an aliveness to risk and experimentation.Murphy is argus-eyed, and her invigilation invokes a kind of spiritual exercise. She performs her poetic work as a meditative attention to the "tone com...

"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting r...

The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry.Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a “re-staging” of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). ...