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This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic-saturated world we are enmeshed in. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended tweets, each section infuses itself with continuously shifting tones, styles, and commentary which in turn are provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, the recent financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through shards and fragments of post-consumerist culture.
Adeena Karasick is a media artist, performer, cultural theorist, and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute in New York. Karasick is also co-founding Artistic Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat. In 2017 the Adeena Karasick Archive was established at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
Her writing is marked with an urban, Jewish, and feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production and blurs the lines between popular culture and scholarly discourse. It has been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), and noted for its “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), its “twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin).
Karasick’s most recent publications are Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, 2017), a Jewish-feminist revisiting of the Biblical story of Salomé, and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014).
Karasick has lectured and performed worldwide, participated in international conferences, telepoetic colloquia, and literary festivals. She regularly publishes articles, reviews, and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural/semiotic theory. She also produces videopoems and sound recordings of her work, which highlight its radical performativity (find them on YouTube), and she was also featured on the TV series Heart of a Poet, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV.
More information on Karasick and and her work can be found on adeenakarasick.com
“ Karasick traces her creative lineage to medieval kabbalistic writings, which, as she points out, “urge the reader to experience language in ‘non-traditional ways’ — extract it from its use value and encourage one to somehow get inside these cosmic and erotic fields of discourse, harness language’s inherent power, and experience the sensation of ever-expanding ‘meaning.’ ” – The Jewish Daily Forward
“[Karasick’s] writing is an extraordinary tour de force in the new paraliterary initiative of ‘fiction/theory’ that blends various genres and revels in their ‘contamination.’ ” – Canadian Book Review Annual
strenuously playful..many bits of sly, allusive (cultural/social/political) commentary that slowly accumulates among all the words at play in the fields of the word, advancing an oblique critique of consumer capitalist culture & its workings…” – Eclectic Ruckus
“Karasick’s is less a poetry of ideas than ideas of poetry – plural, cascading, exuberant in their cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory.” – Charles Bernstein