The Empress Has No Closure

Lisa A. Dickson is a freelance writer living in Guelph.

This collection is concerned with language and the ways in which we are
constructed by it as speaking subjects—an explicitly theoretical
inflection that aligns Karasick’s work with that of other Canadian
postmodern and feminist writers, among them Erin Mouré, Daphne Marlatt,
and Betsy Warland. Karasick uses puns, deliberate misspellings, concrete
forms, and wordplay in order to illustrate how woman “inhabits a
language double-backed / in hearsay, a heresy. / displaced in
hysteria,” and attempts through this bending of language usage to work
against dominant language forms, which often elide women’s
experiences. As Barbara Godard’s comments on the back cover suggest,
the poem sequences and the prose-poetry position statements of the book
cross genres to create a theoretical poetic practice.

These poems demand a lot from the reader. As a theoretical project the
book works well, the stop-and-go traffic-jam rhythms and the endless
declensions of wordplay dramatizing the difficulties involved in making
language tell new stories. While a student of discourse theory and
deconstruction will have little difficulty tracing the lines of the
Derridean skeleton within the book, the general reader will either enjoy
or be frustrated by the mental calisthenics. The collection will
particularly interest those concerned with the mechanisms of thought and
language.