{"product_id":"empires-of-the-everyday-isbn-9780771012365","title":"Empires of the Everyday","description":"\u003cb\u003ePat Lowther Memorial Award, Longlist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn ambitious and wholly original poetry collection that examines the ways that life is confined and sometimes defined by the city and the ubiquity and invisibility of state violence.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe poems in\u003ci\u003e Empires of the Everyday\u003c\/i\u003e give voice to the many “you” who move through a city—one that resembles many modern cities—where plywood shelters are demolished in pandemic winters. Where everyday violence is palpable, but the related media reporting is offhand, cool, distanced, piecemeal, uncontextualized.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn an attempt to access a more revelatory language, the poems spar with an AI translator, disturbing the disease of twenty-first century life that the city makes solid and covers up. Slavery, permanent war, and Empire titter in the resulting language, in its bending of what is possible, as only poetry can do. The poems trace the relationship between the human “you” and the machine “I” through five powerful, nuanced, and thought-provoking episodes.   Anna Lee-Popham’s impressive debut collection is immersed in the current ruptures of the world, rendering a translation of Empire and beyond-Empire to a possible convergence for “you” and “I.”\u003cb\u003ePraise for Anna Lee-Popham and \u003ci\u003eEmpires of the Everyday\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003ePat Lowther Memorial Award, Longlist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The city exacts its towering tolls upon the life that comprises it, the life it ingests, the life living in emergency within it, and Anna Lee-Popham inventories the aftermath with beautiful, exhaustive precision in \u003ci\u003eEmpires of the Everyday\u003c\/i\u003e. Teeming, keening with loss, these poems pull at the threads of our present world and push us to insist on a better one.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Laurie D. Graham, author of \u003ci\u003eFast Commute\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Anna Lee-Popham’s \u003ci\u003eEmpires of the Everyday\u003c\/i\u003e activates the city as contemporaneous theatre and chaotic film strip, showing its underbelly and contrasting currents through freeze frames and montage. Here, you expand and multiply into others, into me, into we, existing in the city’s palimpsestic sediments, forming its grammar. Questions shape pathways as the city channels you into its sinews. Through Lee-Popham’s taut, precise, and muscular language, you address its data and intentions until ‘you become again unknown to yourself’ and ‘make a city possible.’” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Oana Avasilichioaei, author of \u003ci\u003eEight Track\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“‘The city brews new dangers daily \/ then sells you remedies for the fear’ writes Anna Lee-Popham in her debut poetry collection, \u003ci\u003eEmpires of the Everyday\u003c\/i\u003e. These brilliant poems function as defamiliarizing machines, compelling the reader to step back and notice the parallels between Lee-Popham’s fictional empire—with its violence, propaganda, and alienation—and our own. Dunya Mikhail said that ‘poetry is not medicine—it’s an X-ray.’ Lee-Popham’s dystopian poems show us the corrosiveness of empire while simultaneously reminding us that our empire is not inevitable. We can change it, and we must, as Lee-Popham implores us from the very beginning, ‘You stand with an x-ray of the real, \/ its massacres difficult to decipher, your own struggles written \/ in an impossible language, a necessary one, you parse.’” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Paige Lewis, author of\u003ci\u003e Space Struck\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eAnna Lee-Popham is a writer and editor whose poetry and non-fiction has been published in \u003ci\u003eArc Poetry Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBrick\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eCanthius\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRiddle Fence\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAutostraddle\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLingue e Linguaggi\u003c\/i\u003e, and others. Anna holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Toronto.To the City in Translation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt twelve, you awake each morning evaporating\u003cbr\u003eyour public faith limits you, your ears inessential\u003cbr\u003eto the symphony, your uncertainty crawls the cold\u003cbr\u003eavenues of your clavicle, you siphon your blood\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto an anemic language, by twenty-one, you are steeped\u003cbr\u003ewithin a suspended city, the operator says there is no fare\u003cbr\u003eto pay today, beyond the subway’s static walls of each\u003cbr\u003eother’s unknown whereabouts, in this prolific silence\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe city always veers from, this ultimatum to every nation:\u003cbr\u003eWith us. Against us. You stand with an X-ray of the real,\u003cbr\u003eits massacres difficult to decipher, your own struggles written\u003cbr\u003ein an impossible language, a necessary one, you parse\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe city’s wires, at the threshold of doctrine you form\u003cbr\u003eto be on another tongue, you concrete a common thing.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44885618262245,"sku":"NP9780771012365","price":18.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771012365.jpg?v=1767726232","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/empires-of-the-everyday-isbn-9780771012365","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}