Karen Mac Cormack (born

Luanshya Luanshya is a town in Zambia, in the Copperbelt Province near Ndola. It has a population of 117,579 (2008 census). The town is situated in an area which was under Chief Mushili of the Lamba people. Luanshya was founded in the early part of the 20 ...

Zambia Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa. It is typically referred to being in South-Central Africa or Southern Africa. It is bor ...

, 1956) is a contemporary experimental poet. She holds dual British/Canadian citizenship, and lived for many years in

Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

; more recently, she moved to

Buffalo, New York Buffalo is a Administrative divisions of New York (state), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and county seat of Erie County, New York, Erie County. It lies in Western New York at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of ...

, when her husband, the poet

Steve McCaffery Steven McCaffery (born January 24, 1947) is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the David Gray Chair at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. McCaffery was born in Sheffie ...

, was hired by SUNY-Buffalo for the David Gray Chair. Mac Cormack is the author of ''Straw Cupid'' (1987), ''Quirks & Quillets'' (1991), ''Marine Snow'' (1995), ''The Tongue Moves Talk'' (1997), ''At Issue'' (2001), ''Vanity Release'' (2003) and ''Implexures'' (part one, 2003; full-length publication, 2009), as well as a collaboration with the British poet Alan Halsey, ''Fit to Print'' (2003). Though she was not directly part of the

Language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

movement, her work shows many affinities with it, in its use of disjunctiveness at a within-sentence and between-sentence level, and in her interest in the interrogation of cultural norms and ideologies through the skeptical reworking of "found" materials and genres. In ''Fit to Print'', for instance, the poems mimic and distort the format and themes of a typical daily newspaper, while in ''At Issue'' the poems are quarried from the pages of women's fashion and beauty magazines. The prose pieces in the recent project ''Implexures'' are somewhat atypical in their use of biographical and autobiographical materials, especially a series of letters written from a variety of Mediterranean locations by an unnamed female traveller (possibly to be identified with the author, possibly not).

References

* * 1956 births 20th-century Canadian poets 21st-century Canadian poets Canadian women poets Living people People from Luanshya 20th-century Canadian women writers 21st-century Canadian women writers {{Canada-poet-stub