Myrmurs is an innovative variant of the sestina form (a medieval mechanism of desire that spirals around six end words). Connecting medieval textuality to contemporary politics and poetics, this poem explores living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; ants; interspecies entanglements; strange attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it. Following on her critically acclaimed debut collection fur(l) parachute (published by BookThug in 2013), this is the second volume in Shannon Maguire's planned medievalist trilogy.

Shannon Maguire is a non-binary writer and editor. The author of two full-length poetry collections, fur(l) parachute (2013)--shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry--and Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina (2015), Shannon's poetry has been also shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems. Shannon has also published four chapbooks, the most recent of which, As An Eel Through the Body (2016) is a bilingual Finnish/English collaboration with Helsinki-based writer and literary scholar, Vappu Kannas. Shannon edited and wrote the critical introduction to Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (2017). With Lesley Belleau, Shannon is the guest co-editor of the Winter 2017 special issue of Contemporary Verse 2 on Northern Ontarian Innovative and Indigenous Poetics. Shannon lives in Calgary where she is an Assistant Professor (LTA) in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

Shannon Maguire's profile page

Imagine a sestina taken apart by ants and reconfigured as segmented fruit. Imagine empty anglophone calories exposed as petroleum rainbows. Imagine a poetics propelled not by sensitivity to comparison or likeness, but instead by pheromones and their incommensurate, contrapuntal perceptual worlds. Shannon Maguire's Myrmurs experiments on a culture of experimentation. The result is a diffractive study of bodies of noise--in all their queer, incorrigible biological and linguistic volumes. This extraordinary book will crawl all over you.—Adam Dickinson, author of The Polymers

"What a relief to find ant traffic arriving at our picnic. Maguire's poems are acrawl with chaser light shuttles and swaps and deep-kissing industry. Lie back on the cat lick pen nib and let the interswarm of city and green, dream and wake, queer and norm work through your ears, yielding nothing but gorgeous trouble."—Susan Holbrook, author of Joy is So Exhausting

"What a relief to find ant traffic arriving at our picnic. Maguire's poems are acrawl with chaser light shuttles and swaps and deep-kissing industry. Lie back on the cat lick pen nib and let the interswarm of city and green, dream and wake, queer and norm work through your ears, yielding nothing but gorgeous trouble."—Susan Holbrook, author of Joy is So Exhausting

Imagine a sestina taken apart by ants and reconfigured as segmented fruit. Imagine empty anglophone calories exposed as petroleum rainbows. Imagine a poetics propelled not by sensitivity to comparison or likeness, but instead by pheromones and their incommensurate, contrapuntal perceptual worlds. Shannon Maguire's Myrmurs experiments on a culture of experimentation. The result is a diffractive study of bodies of noise--in all their queer, incorrigible biological and linguistic volumes. This extraordinary book will crawl all over you.—Adam Dickinson, author of The Polymers