What Stirs

Where does the fragile, robust self reside when "personal" voice is sent out online into an ironic masquerade ball of alias identity and wanton proxy? What stirs us? Can there be anything authentic about feeling anything anymore? In What Stirs, Christakos looks at our primal appetite for attachment through the modern norms of codependency and co-existence, understanding that the postmodern digital era has created an atmosphere where the vulnerability and tenderness of the individual is both profanely exposed and brazenly reinvented in the arrival of virtual identity. Often playful but never trifling, Christakos' work layers the ecstatic possibilities of lyric poetry, the mundane and intimate extremes of motherhood, and her continued curiosity with experimental poetics in a thoughtful collection of sensual, language-focused, and wonderfully aural poems.

Praise for Christakos' earlier books: "Christakos, a poet of labour, is in addition a brilliant thinker… [She] takes on the antiseptics and anapestics of a male-driven Oulipean procedural vision, and pulls them inside out."--Kevin Killian

"Is Margaret Christakos the love child of David Cronenberg and the queen of the confessional poets, Sharon Olds?"--Georgia Straight