Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them
- Publisher
- Athabasca University Press
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2019
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781771992695
- Publish Date
- Nov 2019
- List Price
- $19.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771992718
- Publish Date
- Oct 2019
- List Price
- $19.99
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Where to buy it
Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 16 to 18
- Grade: 11 to 12
Description
In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative.
About the author
Mark A. McCutcheon is professor of literary studies at Athabasca University. His scholarly publications include articles on such subjects as Canadian popular culture, Frankenstein adaptations, and copyright policy in English Studies in Canada, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Continuum, and Popular Music, among other scholarly journals and books. Mark has also published poetry and short fiction in literary magazines like EVENT, Existere, Carousel, and subTerrain. Originally from Toronto, Mark lives in Edmonton. His scholarly blog is www.academicalism.wordpress.com and he’s on Twitter as @sonicfiction.
Excerpt: Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them (by (author) Mark A. McCutcheon)
that faint nailclip moon looks like a movie poster moon
like an airbrushed cliché anchored above a far planet’s
violet sky opulent with constellations
a planet where some dozen corpse mongers
hoard more in their dead fists than the billions of the barely living
whose pockets vibrate and snitch on their whereabouts
a planet where ancient giant insects still hunt
among the soft-shelled refugees from the latest ice age
a planet whose skies writhe with ghost lights each night
—from “Moon of a far planet”
