Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina by Shannon Maguire

49th Shelf Most Anticipated 2015 Fall Poetry Selection

Myrmurs is an innovative variant of the sestina form (a medieval mechanism of desire that spirals around six end words). Connecting medieval textuality to contemporary politics and poetics, this poem explores living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; ants; interspecies entanglements; strange attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it. Following on her critically acclaimed debut collection fur(l) parachute, this is the second volume in Shannon Maguire’s planned medievalist trilogy.

Watch the Author Interview:

Watch the Book Launch and Reading:

Praise for Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina:

“What a relief to find ant traffic arriving at our picnic. Maguire’s poems are acrawl with chaser light shuttles and swaps and deep-kissing industry. Lie back on the cat lick pen nib and let the interswarm of city and green, dream and wake, queer and norm work through your ears, yielding nothing but gorgeous trouble.” —Susan Holbrook, author of Joy is So Exhausting

“Imagine a sestina taken apart by ants and reconfigured as segmented fruit. Imagine empty anglophone calories exposed as petroleum rainbows. Imagine a poetics propelled not by sensitivity to comparison or likeness, but instead by pheromones and their incommensurate, contrapuntal perceptual worlds. Shannon Maguire’s Myrmurs experiments on a culture of experimentation. The result is a diffractive study of bodies of noise—in all their queer, incorrigible biological and linguistic volumes. This extraordinary book will crawl all over you.” —Adam Dickinson, author of The Polymers, Finalist for the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2014 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Reviews:

“In Myrmurs, Maguire’s is a language poetry composed with a lyric lilt and tone, one constructed with precise measure and a musical ear.” —rob mclennan’s blog

“The book is unabashedly allusive and experimental, smart and playful, and invites an extended explanatory reading that could tease out the richness Maguire has implanted there.” —Adam Sol, How a Poem Moves

“These poems push beyond formal gesturing: they operate at an “interrogatory frequency,” rattling loose the politics of language and gender.” —Michael Roberson, Canadian Literature

Interviews and Profiles:

Shannon Maguire takes The Proust Questionnaire —Open Book Toronto

Beautiful Books – Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina —All Lit Up

7 Questions for Shannon Maguire —Touch the Donkey supplement #42

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Shannon Maguire’s first collection, fur(l) parachute, was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her Fruit Machine was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and “The Fur Parachute Suite” in CV2 was a finalist for the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems. Maguire’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Best American Experimental Writing of 2014, Jacket2, Event, among others. Maguire, who has taught Creative Writing at Algoma University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and an MA in English from Brock University. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she studies noise and queer and Métis poetics. Connect with Maguire on Twitter @avant_elle