Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

by Liz Howard

Overview

Winner of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize

A stunning debut book of poems from a bold new voice unafraid to engage with the exigencies of our contemporary world.
    In Liz Howard’s wild, scintillating debut, the mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds – even our direct intimate experiences of it – come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe, fidelity and apocalypse. The waters of Northern Ontario shield country are the toxic origin and an image of potential. A subject, a woman, a consumer, a polluter; an erotic force, a confused brilliance, a very necessary form of urgency – all are loosely tethered together and made somehow to resonate with our own devotions and fears; made “to be small and dreaming parallel / to ceremony and decay.” Liz Howard is what contemporary poetry needs right now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780771038365
Publisher:	McClelland & Stewart
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.16(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Liz Howard’s first book of poems, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, the first time a debut collection has won the award. The book was also a finalist for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Born and raised in northern Ontario, Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary journals such as The Capilano Review, The Puritan, and Matrix Magazine. Her chapbook Skullambient was a finalist for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing through the University of Guelph and works as a research officer in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Hyperboreal

Terra Nova, Terraformed 1

Neural Cascade: A Chandelier Of Forest Bones 3

Standard Time 5

Look Book 6

Boreal Swing 8

Standard Time 9

1992 10

A Wake 12

Debarker 13

Thinktent 15

Epilogue 23

Some Americas 25

Redress 27

Standard Time 29

Of Hereafter Song

Prologue 33

Contact 37

A Rude Inscription At The Top Of Heaven 39

Henceforth, Through The Forest 41

Tender Pathos: A Denser, Blue Vapour 43

Bigger Than 45

Every Human Heart Is Human 47

Skullambient

Anarchaeology Op Lichen 51

Watershed And Shield Reminiscence 53

Foramen Magnum 55

Steinian Aphasia 57

Sentient: An Oration 58

Psychogeography 61

Hyperboreal

North By South 69

Standard Time 78

Bildungsroman 80

Revenant: Loss 82

Revenant: Misremembered 83

Revenant: Heaven 84

Apostle Of Doubt 85

Ring Sample; Addendum 87

Bingo Riot 88

Anishinaabemowin Glossary 93

Notes 95

Acknowledgements 97

Editorial Reviews

03/14/2016
Howard's debut is a controlled, powerful frenzy of imagery and language. Almost deconstructivist in execution, the four sections of this poetry collection braid language—English, Anishinaabemowin, experimental, and recombinative—with false histories, assimilation, and colonialist and anti-colonialist narrative. The resulting exquisitely entangled forms perhaps reflect Howard's own mixed ancestry. Even the title, drawn from Howard's poem "Thinktent"—"inside my own head perpetually/ not simply Wittgenstein's girl/ but an infinite citizen in a shaking tent"—is layered commentary on micro and macro structure, internal and external narrative, and the dichotomy between experience and constructed narrative. The book's larger structure builds similarly. Through the four sections—"Hyperboreal," "Of Hereafter Song," "Skullambient," and another, different "Hyperboreal"—Howard's work is never content to stand still, and is constantly in conversation with itself as well as its subject matter. The collection is interweaving, recursive, exponential in measure, and extraordinary in its use of form. Howard creates a stunning (in every sense of the word), cohesive whole that demands rereading and reflection. If it is at times too internally conversant, eschewing full cogency, that is no failing but rather part of its commentary. That choice leaves the collection still markedly strong and deeply impressive. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Globe and Mail 100 — 2015

“In these gorgeously heretical poems, Liz Howard sculpts a vocabulary that is co-extensive with the tenacious landscape of the North and the deeply resistant jurisdiction of a female natural history. Shot through too with urban furor, forest, dioxin, tern, and sulphur are syllabic elements in a passionate argument for pleasure, where pleasure is one name for a principled refusal of the colonizing machinations of the current regime. Not afraid to draw limits that are both sonic and ethical, robust and delicate, Howard listens closely to the bodies of this thinking earth.”
– Lisa Robertson, author of Cinema of the Present

From the Publisher