Her Paraphernalia

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Essays. Women's Studies. HER PARAPHERNALIA, the new book of creative non-fiction from Canadian poet Margaret Christakos, presents an intimate and original collection of midlife writings that seeks to make readers think in a very personalized way about family geneology, private sexuality and life changes, including those experiences that exist at the intersections of contemporary digital culture. Christakos's virtuosity with language and wordplay tantalizes through a sequence of ten etudes (consisting of entre-genre pieces, including prose and lyric poetry, experimental writing that integrates elements of social media posts, and other forms) that explore women's and girls' relationships to self-portraiture in the Digital Age, and considers aspects of how we negotiate our public and private identities as women, mothers, and daughters. Christakos wrote HER PARAPHERNALIA as a love song to her mother and daughter. As such, the collection is at once a personal and yet wholly personable entree into major themes that many people of all ages and stages can relate to--self-identity, the beauty of the selfie, partnership, divorce, miscarriage, menstruation, sexual lust, solo travel, depression, menopause, the death of a parent, the writing life, and women's transgenerational vitality, among others. "Easily one of our most daring, consistently inventive and deeply engaged contemporary Canadian poets."--rob mclennan "In Christakos's work the public and private are emphatically not separate. Multitudes provides readers with a poetics well tuned to rearticulate an insistently present tense."--Jason Weins