Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them

By Mark A. McCutcheon
Categories: Literature & Language Studies, Poetry, Canadian Literature, Health, Social Work & Psychology, Psychology, Environmental & Nature Studies, Climate Change, Social Sciences, Family Studies, Education, Higher Education
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Paperback : 9781771992695, 100 pages, November 2019
Ebook (PDF) : 9781771992701, 92 pages, October 2019
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781771992718, 92 pages, October 2019
Ebook (Kindle) : 9781771992725, 92 pages, October 2019
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Excerpt

that faint nailclip moon looks like a movie poster moon
like an airbrushed cliché anchored above a far planet’s
violet sky opulent with constellations

a planet where some dozen corpse mongers
hoard more in their dead fists than the billions of the barely living
whose pockets vibrate and snitch on their whereabouts

a planet where ancient giant insects still hunt
among the soft-shelled refugees from the latest ice age
a planet whose skies writhe with ghost lights each night

—from “Moon of a far planet”

Description

In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative.