O Cidadan: Poems

by Erín Moure

A candid and passionate consideration of citizenship viewed through the feminine, O Cidadán examines borders in language and in the body, to explore ways in which we might rethink nation and community in our era. Erín Moure's poems pulse. They shift and overlap, echo, and capture sensual and political hinges in our social topography. Drawing on puns, shadows, images, charts and crosswords, Moure's poetic forms belie any settled, safe habitation of the page—extending the textual possibilities of language and expression, as Moure grapples with how we might exist as citizens. Gritty, argumentative, funny, and moody, O Cidadán is Erín Moure's final volume in a decade-long trilogy of work exploring language, feeling, responsibility, and identity within the liminal territories we occupy. The first critically acclaimed volumes were Search Procedures, nominated for the 1996 Governor General's Award for poetry, and A Frame of the Book (also called The Frame of a Book), nominated for the 1999 QSPELL A. M. Klein Poetry Prize and the 1999 Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

Genres: Poetry

148 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Erín Moure is a transborder poet and translator of poetry and poetics. In Canada, the USA, and the UK (variously), she has published seventeen books of poetry, and several books of prose including a memoir and a book of short takes on translation. Her most recent book is Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (ed. Shannon Maguire, Wesleyan 2017). She is the translator or co-translator of seventeen books of poetry and three books of non-fiction (biopoetics) from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese into English. Her translation of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017) was a finalist for a 2018 Best Translated Book Award. She holds two honorary doctorates for her contributions to poetry and translation, from Brandon University in Canada and the Universidade de Vigo in Spain. She lives in Montreal.

Reviews

[Sonia Jarmula · Rating 1 out of 5]

Avant-garde poetry like this, which seemingly has all style (questionable use of the word) and no substance, is really not for me. Shame I’m paying to take a class studying it.

[Joe]

Shuttles between

"her article to touch or not her article.

my lips miss "kindred"

Zinc bar on the rue de Rennes (Au Vieux Colombier"

&

"It is how citizenship acts I dream of, acts not constrained or dilated by nation, especially as nation-state and its 19thc. model of sovereignty. Rather, acts as movements or gestures across a differential plane, not tied solely to ideology's (history's) rank function. But how to articulate this without invoking transcendent "citizens" as if Platonic "ideas"?

citizen/ethics/"lability of meaning"/borders/poetry y theory / polylingualsim / more

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic and civic. A gorgeous opus about the territorializing of 'a citizen,' and the tricky, border-crossing confusions an ethnic identity must translate into to navigate, or move. This work is powerful, an amazing notebook of identity that is ephemeral, dis/connected, challenging. Bi-lingual, multi-partisan, and quadra-genre (part poetry, part dispatch/expose, part puzzle, part translation), this is a book for all the populace.