< Erín Moure in Montreal

 Join Erin Moure as she launches her new work, My Beloved Wager, along side other poetic greats Stephen Collis and Norma Cole.

Click here to enter the Akimbo.ca contest to win books from all three authors.

About the book My Beloved Wager gathers essays by noted poet and translator Erín Moure, and records a quarter century of writing practice emerging from a city of exhilarating poetic and translatory possibility: Montreal. In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.

For the media To schedule an interview with Erin Moure (a Montreal resident), please contact Diane Cameron at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or (780) 432-9427.

About the author Erín Moure is a Canadian poet and translator who lives in Montreal. Since releasing her first book in 1979, she has published several award-winning English poetry collections and translated the poetry of acclaimed Quebec writer Nicole Brossard from French (with Robert Majzels) and Chus Pato from Galician, among others. Moure has published poetry and translations in over 150 journals and anthologies in several countries, and her poems have been translated into eight languages.

 In 2008, Moure was awarded an honorary doctorate (D.Lit.) from Brandon University in recognition of her contributions to poetry. Her translation of Chus Pato’s famed m-Talá was released simultaneously in Canada and the UK in Spring 2009, and her next solo book of poetry, O Resplandor, will be released in February 2010.

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry, Mine (New Star 2001), Anarchive (New Star 2005), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, The Commons (Talonbooks 2008)—the latter two form parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”—and On the Material (Talonbooks 2010). He is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006). He teaches American literature, poetry, and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

About the Book: Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed—taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call “privatization”—but it spilt over into Romanticism’s own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in “the literary” since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing capitalist accumulations and a renascent sense of the commons under globalization.

Norma Cole

Among Norma Cole’s recent books of poetry are Natural Light from Libellum Press and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 from City Lights. Cole’s essays and talks, To Be At Music, will appear in June 2010 from Omnidawn Press. Cole has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She teaches at the University Of San Francisco.

About the book: Where Shadows Will selects from twenty years of innovative writing by Bay A-rea poet, translator, and visual artist Norma Cole. It is a comprehensive overview of Cole's melodic and experimental poetry, whose shadow-haunted landscapes embody a theory-informed exploration of the relationship between language, self, and world. By turns severe and exuberant, Where Shadows Will confirms Cole's place as a major avant-garde poet and a leading voice among contemporary innovative women writers.