Boreal Swing

• Main Author: Howard, Liz
• Other Authors: Houle, Karen
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Guelph 2014
• Subjects: poetry; ecology; First Nations; feminism; Canada
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10214/8386

This thesis is a work of poetry that explores a poetics of uncertainty and troubled ecology. It details a journey from the stark wilderness of the boreal forest into urban cacophony and material plenitude. It confronts the problem of language as a conduit for consciousness through which we must provide an account of ourselves and exist as political subjects. In these poems language foraged from cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, literary theory and environmental science is remixed to defamiliarize received notions of the natural world and what it means to be human. They are reflective of states of doubleness: of settler and indigenous identity, of rural and urban life, of the exactitude possible through science and the expansive potential of poetry. In Boreal Swing poetry is proffered as a joyful thinking congress with ourselves and our others, within language and its infinite permutations. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada 2999-12-31