Bent at the Spine offers a 'pronoun'-ced frolic where the "you' is a disconnected third party - the reader is left in the position of an eavesdropper, or a listener, or a karma-surplus author. Its relentless interrogation resonates at an invigorating pace: cultural difference, different bodies, diffident accents, deafening rhymes. Sometimes rapturous, often vulvy, the poems audaciously teach "you" how to read them, allowing the last-minute-cram-session to be a delving, a plunging, a repeating discovery.

Nicole Markotic is a poet, novelist, and critic. Her poetry books include Bent At the Spine (BookThug), Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, and Connect the Dots (Wolsak & Wynn); her novels are Yellow Pages (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) and Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot (Arsenal Pulp Press). She has edited a collection of poetry by Dennis Cooley, By Word of Mouth, co-edited (with Sally Chivers) an anthology of essays concerning representations of disability, The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film, is working on a critical book on disability and literature (McFarland & Co), and has an edited collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch (forthcoming with Guernica). She has published in literary journals in Canada, the USA, Australia, and Europe (including The Capilano Review, CV2, filling Station, New American Writing, Open Letter, Prairie Fire, Rampike, and West Coast Line). She won the bpNichol Poetry Chapbook Award in 1998, and was nominated for the Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Book of the Year Award and for the Henry Kreisel First Book of the Year Award. She edits the chapbook series, Wrinkle Press (publishing such poets as Robert Kroetsch, Nikki Reimer, and Fred Wah), and has worked as an editor for Red Deer Press and NeWest Press. Currently, Nicole Markotic is Professor of Creative Writing, Children’s Literature, and Disability Studies at the University of Windsor.

Nicole Markotic's profile page

“The agile poems in Markotic’s Bent at the Spine are nerve-knotted corridors that ail, salve, flail and laugh. They seem stand-up, until I realize they sprawl, a little languid, grinning with all the fun they’re having. Her words being vertebral can pop out of place; Markotić vents them, also prods alignment back stride-ready. She’s a writer uniquely edgy about the connectedness of how meaning-matches made by bodies crash and reunify. Her stanzas take their corners tight and thread along to an always-next torque. This book’s bent all right. Its spine’s a duffled gift.” —Margaret Christakos

“The agile poems in Markotic’s Bent at the Spine are nerve-knotted corridors that ail, salve, flail and laugh. They seem stand-up, until I realize they sprawl, a little languid, grinning with all the fun they’re having. Her words being vertebral can pop out of place; Markotić vents them, also prods alignment back stride-ready. She’s a writer uniquely edgy about the connectedness of how meaning-matches made by bodies crash and reunify. Her stanzas take their corners tight and thread along to an always-next torque. This book’s bent all right. Its spine’s a duffled gift.” —Margaret Christakos