Population Me: Essays on David Mcgimpsey

by Alessandro Porco

Since the early 1990s, Montreals David McGimpsey has been producing his unique, pop-acculturated poetry and fiction, indebted in equal parts to TV shows such as Hawaii Five-0 and Charlies Angels as well as Shakespearean tragedy and the Miltonic elegy. His poems and performances have garnered a wide readership and popular acclaim across North America. Population Essays on David McGimpsey gathers together, for the first time, a collection of essays that serve to highlight and explicate the scope and complexity of McGimpseys poetic practice. The collected essays (by lauded poets and scholars such as Nick Mount, Jason Camlot and Elizabeth Bachinsky) examine McGimpseys various positions on literary history, class, nationalism, humor, love, and aesthetics, all of which are often mutually imbricated in McGimpseys work. The book concludes with an entertaining and enlightening in-depth interview with McGimpsey, where he discusses, with all the wit and keen critical acumen weve come to expect, everything from his early experiences growing up in Montreals East-End to the prospect of sympathy in and through poetry. Population Me is a timely addition to Canadian letters and a collection that makes clear McGimpseys significant contribution to contemporary Canadian literature.

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

About the author

Alessandro Porco is a poet, critic, and scholar. Currently, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he is working toward a dissertation on the subject of hip-hop poetics. The author of The Jill Kelly Poems and the forthcoming Augustine in Carthage, he is originally from Brampton, Ontario. His poetry has appeared in such literary magazines as Matrix, Grain, and Queen Street Quarterly.