Expeditions of a Chimæra

Expeditions, taken up by the explorers we all are, ultimately cannot be read. Only experienced. On venturing into it, you’ll find your ticket is no good, expired, or valid only on Tuesday. Your fellow travellers will tell you you are wearing the wrong shoes. If you force your way past the gate, you will stub your toe, scrape your shins, lose your suitcase, throw the book across the room in a fit of outrage or fall under its spell and suddenly find it half-submerged in your bathwater. At times, you will even laugh aloud. Expeditions of a Chim æra is dialogic. Four pairs of hands try their luck at a game of cards. Nearby, questions sit, waiting to be asked. These expeditions are not progressions but digressions; they are translational in their effort to pull the author, kicking and screaming, out of the hat of authorial impossibilities.

Expeditions expedites you into a circus: there is disguise, an acrobatic puff of smoke, a clown’s painted face, a human cannonball and, down below its tightrope, an arena full of pawprints, with no net to catch your fall. – Otilia Acacia

Oana Avasilichioaei is a poet and translator who transformed the landscape of Vancouver’s Hastings Park into an acclaimed book of poems, feria: a poempark (2008). She has translated Nichita Stănescu from Romanian, Louise Cotnoir and Geneviève Desrosiers from French, created visual textworks for galleries in Montreal and Vancouver, and has performed her work in Canada, the US, Mexico and Europe. Her first book, Abandon (2005) has been translated into Spanish as Abandono and will soon appear in Mexico City.

Erín Moure has written a dozen books of poetry, most recently O Cadoiro (2007). Her 2005 Little Theatres was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the GGs; it won the AJM Klein Prize, made the Globe 100, and was translated into Galician as Teatriños (Galaxia, 2007). Her translation of Galician poet Chus Pato’s Charenton came out in 2007 from Shearsman (UK) and BuschekBooks (Ottawa) and her translation of Pato’s m-Talá appeared in 2009 from the same presses.. A book of essays, My Beloved Wager, will appear in September from NeWest Press.