BC Poetry 2018: "Checking In" by Adeena Karasick (Talonbooks)

from Checking In

Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify

Bartleby just checked in at Scribner’s

Marshall McLuhan is rockin’ out to the Global Village People

bp is filling up at BP

Moses Maimonides is launching the Hitchhiker’s Guide for the Perplexed

Herman Melville is listening to Hootie and the Blowfish

William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud

Jean Baudrillard is reading Beyond the Looking-Glass

Jacques Derrida’s Glas is half full (but his copula runneth over) 

Alfred Hitchcock is listening to Counting Crows

J. Alfred Prufrock uploaded 1000 insects to his Wall

Dorothy Wordsworth is listening to 
Shakespears Sister

Who?

Adeena Karasick is a media artist, performer, cultural theorist, and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute in New York. Karasick is also co-founding Artistic Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat. In 2017 the Adeena Karasick Archive was established at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.


What?

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces – concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms – that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection.

The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture. As a euphoric parade of “alternative facts” or “fake news,” “Checking In” offers satiric comment on the state of American politics. Each ironically investigative line erupts as a self-reflexive mash-up, speaking to our seemingly insatiable desire for information while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.

The Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. We seek fulfillment but enter an unsettling, uninhibited flow of information in which every data point refers to itself and reinforces a techno-capitalist culture. Checking In founds a site of radical, grafted linkages, codes, indices, ludic identities. An interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, analyses, echoes, and provocations, (re)presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities, its poems are inter-subjective theatres of infinite re-framing. From Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants to bill bissett and Slavoj Žižek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In tours the shards of post-consumerist culture and reminds us we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us, and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking …

Karasick’s words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer’s concoctions; as ever, they’re fun, smart, and topical.


When?

Arriving May 1, 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Luxuriating in the materiality of language.

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The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.