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From Toronto based-writer Gerry Shikatani, who has worked across the textual, visual, and aural domains, from performance to experimental film, comes We Have Seasonal Bodies: The Poetry of Gerry Shikatani. Selected and introduced by poet and scholar Eric Schmaltz, this volume brings together poetry and visual texts from across Shikatani’s multifaceted and dynamic oeuvre and concludes with a compelling dialogue between Shikatani and poet and critic Deanna Fong.
Schmaltz has drawn selections from across Shikatani’s career, including some of his earliest ephemeral works from the early 1970s with the little-known publisher missing link press. Some of these poems are reproduced in this collection for the very first time since their original publication date. This volume also includes standalone lyrical and formally experimental poems from Shikatani’s first full-length books, along with excerpts from his signature serial travel poems, a form he notably explored in Aqueduct—a 400-plus-page book of long-form poetry documenting his travels across Europe, particularly France and Spain.
We Have Seasonal Bodies is not a definitive selection; rather, it is a long-overdue reintroduction to Shikatani’s poetry—his standalone poems and excerpts from longer projects—presenting the inimitable perspective and adventurous spirit of his writing, which brings extraordinary beauty into this world.
Gerry Shikatani is a writer based in Toronto who has worked across the textual, visual, and aural domains, from performance to experimental film, since 1970. He is the co-editor of Paper Doors (Coach House) and has created documentaries and commentaries for CBC Radio and published articles on travel, sports, and gastronomy across Canada and abroad. An international dining critic and commentator and expert on Spain, Shikatani is the founding director of a writers’ retreat in Granada, Spain. He holds Spain's Official Cross in the Order of Civilian Merit granted by The King of Spain.
Eric Schmaltz (Edited by)
Eric Schmaltz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. He is the author of poetry books I Confess (Coach House Books) and Surfaces (Invisible Publishing), and the academic monograph Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 (University of Calgary Press). He is editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks) and co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (University of Calgary Press). He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax).