The Politics of Knives

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge the gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming. She made hyphens and made me use them. From her back she pulled brackets. Saying: "These in your throat and these around your neck." Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities.