Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina

How are self-regulating systems such as cities, languages, and ant colonies alike or unalike? What does a medieval love poem have to do with neocolonialism? What politics does interspecies desire entail? How can we escape the trappings of enlightenment and make meaning otherwise?

Myrmurs explores the connection between medieval texts and textuality, and contemporary poetics and politics. In this book, acclaimed Canadian poet Shannon Maguire uses the form of the sestina, a medieval love-poem that follows a set pattern based around six end words, as a starting point to explore living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; ants; post-human entanglements and attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it.

Following on her critically acclaimed, fur(l) parachute (published by BookThug in 2013), this second collection in Maguire’s planned medievalist trilogy develops a new type of poetic form -- "the exploded sestina," borrowing the sestina’s pattern of repetition and obsession with the number six, but transforming it into a 39-part network of poems. Beside and around the text are notes or "illuminations" that hint at some of the ways Maguire thinks about self-organization and political and amorous attachments.

People interested in medievalism and surrealism, eco-critical poetics, and queer theory will excite in this innovative and nuanced work -- though they may never look at ants or language the same way again.

Praise for Shannon Maguire:

"Maguire grapples with poetic heredity in a quest to reconstruct a pastoral lyric from translation and procedure." --Angela Rawlings, author ofWide slumber for lepidopterists

"Looking around at the landscape of poetry that continues to matter deeply to me, I see in Maguire kin I didn’t know I had. I believe I have found a new favourite poet." --Stephen Collis, author ofTo the Barricades

Praise for fur(l) parachute:"In her astonishing and original fur(l) parachute, Shannon Maguire trans-slants the Old English poem ’Wulf and Eadwacer’ to offer us our queer, extra-human being still capable of love and mourning. The green world is alive, tender and reproductive in unexpectedly animal and technological ways. In the break between original and translation, all the bodies we thought we’d lost writhe--full of life. Read and feed this shining word whelp to remember your collective difference. The best thing I’ve read in years." --Larissa Lai, author of Automaton Biographies