The Most Charming Creatures

With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise,The Most Charming Creaturesexplores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and "turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything," they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch."

A follow-up to the award-winning author's acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin's examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation.

But what are the "most charming creatures" of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) "the most charming creatures," but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self.

From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: "it's a miracle that we've survived / it's a miracle that we've survived at all." (From ECW Press)

The Most Charming Creaturesis available on Sept. 20, 2022.

The bestselling author of 26 books of fiction and poetry,Gary Barwinhas won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Hamilton, Ont.

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Interviews with Gary Barwin

15:08Gary Barwin on Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

Gary Barwin talks with Shelagh Rogers about his novel Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won a 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award.

The Next Chapter3:26Gary Barwin on "Yiddish for Pirates"

Author Gary Barwin on the inspiration for his first novel.