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The funniest poet in Canada reveals again and again that language is hilarious, but the fun and games of Unfurling roll out with weighty purpose. This collection includes selections from several of Susan Holbrook’s poetry books, all replete with her signature humour, innovation, sleeve of hearts, and incisive cultural critique. Words and worlds unfurl, opened up to playful and serious scrutiny and opening out into more inclusive and joyful possibilities.
From 1999’s misled—is it pronounced MISS-LED or MY-ZULD? And what’s the difference?—to the recent Steamy, a comic unveiling of the 45 (and counting) symptoms of menopause, Holbrook speaks the unspoken and invites a renewed rapport with English, reveling in its indefatigable leafing out.
Unfurling displays Holbrook’s expansive embrace of genre, featuring lyric, conceptual, concrete, prose-poetry, minimalist, and constraint pieces, including from her chapbook Canon, in which she rewrites five great works of literature using only the digits of a Canon calculator. Was that a good use of her time? The gorgeous queer translation says yes. As she notes in her anagrammatic poem “What is Poetry?” poetry is “ape with story / or what ye spit / or what yeps it.”
Susan Holbrook has published the poetry books ink earl, Throaty Wipes, Joy Is So Exhausting, and misled. Among her other works are the textbook How to Read (and Write About) Poetry, an edition of the Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, and a non-fiction comic memoir called Steamy: a Menopause Symptomology. She lives in Leamington, Ontario and teaches at the University of Windsor.
Nasser Hussain is a poet, editor, critic and teacher. He is the author SKY WRI TEI NGS (2018), Love Language (2023), and The Point! (2026). He currently lives in Leeds, UK.