Social Poesis

Rachel Zolf's five books of poetry include three published with Coach House Books. She won a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and was finalist for several other prizes. Zolf's literary papers are housed at York University and Simon Fraser University. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.Heather Milne is an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg. She is the author of Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics (2018) and co-editor of Prismatic Publics, Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (2009).

I've long been fascinated by Zolf's project-based work, something that has become more overt as she continues to publish, utilized to examine human interaction, and a variety of social and cultural histories. Zolf might utilize external means to produce work, but her concerns are deeply human, from the intimate to the professional to the historical, and the dark elements that so often are deliberately set aside. ... This book exists as both an impressive overview of Zolf's ongoing work, and a wonderful introduction to what she's accomplished so far, much of which, I would argue, hasn't received the attention it so clearly deserves. -- rob mclennan -- 20190609