Adeena Karasick is an internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist,
and is completing her PhD in Montreal, exploring the interplay of Kabbalistic
/ feminist and deconstructionist discourses. Dedicated to language-centered
writing, ethnic and gender concerns, she has also published numerous articles,
reviews and dialogues on contemporary poetry and poetics, and has performed
extensively -- participating in conferences, telepoetic colloquia and literary
festivals worldwide. Her books include Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996),
Memewars (Talonbooks, 1994) and The Empress Has No Closure
(Talonbooks, 1992).


GENRECIDE

Adeena Karasick

Palimpsesting Hitler, Goebbles and Derrida with The Violent Femmes,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Gary Larson, Genrecide explores
the intersection of multiple cultures, codes, idioms and constructs that
impact on female identity. The book is divided into three sections. In
full colour, the opening section investigates limits, frames, borders and
the contamination or transgression of borders and focuses on genre as
a site of bondage and language as a signifying body of domination and
resistance. The second section explores the concept of place. Particularly
looking at the Canadian Prairies, it questions place as a stable, coherent,
identifiable locus and explores how issues of otherness and alterity get
translated through geography and langauge. The third section written
from Lilongwe (Malawi) Africa investigates how gender, nationality
and ethnicity, as post-colonial conditions, are re-viewed as shifting and
multiperspectival frames, borders, mirrors, screens, laws. Through
the infusion of urban, academic and pop cultural references, Genrecide
explores the relation of genre / genus / genesis / gender and carves out
a s/cite for a culturally concerned Canadian feminist poetics.


"...an interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation of various
discourses (poetic, critical, autobiographical, feminist and historical, with
a special emphasis on the history of Jews and the Holocaust) and languages
(English, French, German, Hebrew), including the intersemiotic transcoding
between the body and writing...In the tradition of the historical avant-garde
...the writing is certainly a feast for readers who appreciate 'the dance of
the intellect'."

-- Canadian Book Review Annual


"Karasick's is less a poetry of ideas than ideas of poetry -- plural,
cascading, exuberant in their cross-fertilization of punning and knowing,
theatre and theory."

-- Charles Bernstein


<^>