Canisia Lubrin returns with a mesmerizing new collection, the follow-up to her breakout book, Voodoo Hypothesis.
CANISIA LUBRIN is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lubrin's most recent poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst, was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and named a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City- Vol 1 and twice longlisted for the Journey Prize. She was Writer in Residence at Queen's University in 2019 and was named a Writers' Trust 2020 Rising Star. In 2021, Lubrin was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction debut, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.
Praise for Canisia Lubrin and The Dyzgraphxst:
"This book changed me when I was reading it. The first
encounter felt almost grilling. It was as if one of those machines
that opticians use was opening up in my insides, click, click,
click, blurring and re-focusing my eyes until I saw afresh with
stunning clarity and in a greater field of vision than before. From
section to section, there was this repeated process of
re-visioning. These poems take apart our individual personal
pronoun, the 'I', questioning and finding new ways to feel and
think and know what we suppose to be our self. Some books use
language to keep running smoothly, this book shifts what language
can be and do. It is thrilling to read it and to relish giving up
the illusion of mastery of meaning, revel in the not fully
understanding, like swimming beyond the breakers in a sea full of
flotsam and jetsam. Reading The Dyzgraphxst a second time,
aware of its stunning intelligence and moral commitment, I was
taken back afresh, this time, by the beauty of the poetry. The
intelligence plays through vivid, and a true ecology of being in
which a butterfly can open from an eye." -Vahni Capildeo, Overall
Judge, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature
"[A] journey where meaning is often an unpaved road, but the ride
is richly satisfying. . . . Reading this collection makes you hold
your breath and dive to the ocean-floor and emerge riding the
waves." -OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Jury
Citation
"The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin's spectacular feat of
architecture called a poem. Built with 'I'-a single mark on the
page, a voice, a blade, 'a life-force soaring back'-and assembled
over seven acts addressing language, grammar, sentence, line,
stage, and world, the poet forms, invents, surprises, and sharpens
life. Generous, generating, and an abundance of rigour. A wide and
widening ocean of feeling are the blueprints of this book. It is
shaped to be 'the shape of the shape / of the shape of a thing that
light curves over time / length to width to depth and all of us its
information.'" -Griffin Poetry Prize, Jury
Citation
"Gorgeously layered, ambitious in scope, The Dyzgraphxst
performs a marvelous resistance to simple orthodoxies of selfhood
in poetry. Lubrin reimagines the contours of genre and form, even
language's possibility for complexity, plenitude, fracture, and
assemblage." -Major Jackson, Judge's Citation, The Derek Walcott
Prize for Poetry
"[A] startling and ambitious work on several levels: its sustained
meditation on the limits of 'I,' its subversion of poetic genre,
its radical preoccupation with language's negating effects, its
insightful realizations of the body: historical, gendered,
racialized."-The Malahat Review
"The Dyzgraphxst recalibrates the colonial orientation of
the tongue that has been taught to language, to hold and protect
speech for only one, expected empire. Here are poems that not only
trouble the lexicography, they ramfle the library of the regime;
they make mas in the gayelles of Black queer survival and thriving.
Open to any page, and Lubrin's language prompts you to brocade it
large in your diary of finest utterances."-Caribbean
Beat
"[A]n ambitious project, combining a lyric attention to the
representation of the self with an epic scope and focus on the fate
of a community, in this case on a planetary scale. If Lubrin's 2017
debut, Voodoo Hypothesis, presented a significant new poetic
talent on the Canadian scene, The Dyzgraphxst marks a
considerable development in that talent's achievement." -Quill &
Quire (Starred Review)
"Patwa, French, and English reverberate together in the text
sonically, geographically, and essentially-and showcase Lubrin's
multi-linguistic dexterity."-The Humber Literary
Review
"Lubrin shows us how far poetry can stretch, and how malleable and
pliable the medium. Lubrin is also a master of code and page play."
-Hamilton Review of Books
"A complex and unconventional collection of crinkly and
deep-cutting lines." -Winnipeg Free Press
"The Dyzgraphxst is its own vocabulary, its own knowingness. It is
an incredible, elliptical journey, a masterful work that demands to
be reread." -Alycia Piromohamed, The Ampersand Review
"I keep returning to Canisia Lubrin's The Dyzgraphxst. Among
the questions it poses is how the lyrical I affirms the
first person of neoliberal individualism, 'the fantasy of the
discontinuous.' Lubrin's visionary syntax locates hierarchical
violence where it roots in the language itself. She thinks as
intricately at the level of the syllable ('where I walks the
split-tongued edge begging for nil') as she does across larger
formal architectures. Speakers of the poem, which Lubrin terms 'an
ocean drama," include "i: First person singular. I: Second person
singular. I: Third person plural,' and Jejune: 'the chorus, the
you, the we/unnavigable self.' Together they enact an infinite
capaciousness, 'this thing big enough for laughter, an exhumed
patois.'" -Margaret Ross, The Paris Review blog
"This book is a triumph of anticolonial poetics. In this poet's
steady hands, the world within flashes a perfectly dark mirror.
Here, our fractured history is projected through Lubrin's fractured
voices, her dazzlingly splintered verse. By inventing her own lyric
architecture, imbued with startling and slant textual experiments,
each line sings with a multitude of tongues, until Lubrin's verse
coalesces into her own individual patois. Her lines twist like
roots gathering voices, roiling waves of language that immerses the
reader inside the poet's distinct rhythm. Unsparingly political,
and charged with great wit, these poems tackle climate change, the
immigrant experience, and critiques the long colonial shadow of the
west. Settled in its marrow is a sense of loss-loss of selves, of
country, of family, of a mother tongue, all transformed by The
Dyzgraphxst into its own potent kind of singing, armed with
this defiant blaze of being alive." -Safiya Sinclair, author of
Cannibal
"Canisia Lubrin's extraordinary second collection, The Dyzgraphxst,
'[is] a moonlit knife.' By which I mean, it is as sharp-witted as
it is sharp-eyed. With the blade pointed up, Lubrin unceasingly and
masterfully holds the hypothetical knife up to the face of Jejune,
the poem's protagonist, so she might see her reflection-so we,
lucky readers, might see ourselves. And, I'm here for all of
it."-Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast
"Canisia Lubrin's The Dyzgraphxst disrupts the conventional
grammars of knowing, the grammars that represent as much as they
create invidious divisions-between the ionic column of the
self-important 'I' and the he/she/you; between subject and object;
between the political and the personal; between the times we live
in and the writing that seeks not merely to represent it but to
(re)create it as well; between utter brokenness and carrying on.
Though the dyzgraphxst is one who suffers from disgraphia, this
disgraphia seems to be claimed (even stylized) as the legitimate
language of the time and for the self, therein subverting
conventional and oppressive hierarchies internal and external to
oneself, in which the creolized or pidginized selves dominate the
dialectic, are given agency and are those best suited to negotiate
the modern unravelling world and self. The particular challenge and
conceit of the collection, is that most of this is found in the
grammar itself, in the sinews of language and canyons between one
word and the next, as in the consonantal angularity of its title,
in the sometimes unlanguageable darknesses of self-searching in a
fractured, confusing world." -Vladimir Lucien, author of Sounding
Ground
"We who come from songs will recognize ourselves in Canisia
Lubrin's The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin sings us into being and breathing
us through these times with lyrical energy that is at once delicate
and forceful."-Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days
"The Dyzgraphxst pushes the envelope of the lyric self to describe
the human self. Canisia has shuffled the deck and added a new
identity to the creative table."-Nick Makoha, author of Kingdom of
Gravity
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
