Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984-1999

by Fred Wah

According to Fred Wah, the act of thinking critically is one of exploration and discovery. In this book, Wah demonstrates how writing poetry is writing critically. This scrapbook of Wah's work -- collected from fifteen years of his writing -- contains essays, reviews, journals, notes and, most importantly, poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity. Faking It was written between 1984 and 1999 -- during major shifts in critical thinking and cultural production -- and the hybrid style of the book is an apt reflection of these changing times, as well as a reflection and study of Wah's own hybrid identity.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2000

About the author

Fred Wah has been involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. Recent books are the biofiction Diamond Grill (1996), Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (2000), a collection of essays, and Sentenced to Light (2008), a collection of poetic image/text projects. He splits his time between the Kootenays in southeastern B.C. and Vancouver.

Reviews

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In order to actualize this hybridity...the hybrid writer must (one might suspect, necessarily) develop instruments of disturbance, dislocation, and displacement. The hyphen, even when it is notated, is often silent and transparent. I’d like to make the noise surrounding it more audible, the pigment of its skin more visible.” (73).

A great collection of essays and not-quite-essays thinking through a lot of really complex and complicated ideas, wading through the jargon, and usually coming out with something useful for writing on the other end.

I wish more literary theory like this was this legible, and this earnest. A real treat.

[Quill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book about theory which provided me with several lenses in which to understand my own work. Much of the theory is based around poetry and not overly useful to me but the parts more directly about race were quite remarkable.

[Paolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world should read more of Fred Wah, and this book of critical essays (and variations of it) about race, hybridity, ethnography, Can.Lit, is a breathtaking map to/thru his thought and praxis. Like 'Diamond Grill', I just re-read this book the past month, and I cannot recommend it enough to you. Repeat after me: Fred Wah. Fred Wah. Fred Wah.