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ISBN: 978-1-926794-00-6
6 x 9, 160 pages
Trade paperback
$21.50 CDN

Since the early 1990s, Montreal’s David McGimpsey has been producing his unique, pop-acculturated poetry and fiction, indebted in equal parts to TV shows such as Hawaii Five-0 and Charlie’s Angels as well as Shakespearean tragedy and the Miltonic elegy. His poems and performances have garnered a wide readership and popular acclaim across North America. Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey gathers together, for the first time, a collection of essays that serve to highlight and explicate the scope and complexity of McGimpsey’s poetic practice. The collected essays (by lauded poets and scholars such as Nick Mount, Jason Camlot and Elizabeth Bachinsky) examine McGimpsey’s various positions on literary history, class, nationalism, humor, love, and aesthetics, all of which are often mutually imbricated in McGimpsey’s work. The book concludes with an entertaining and enlightening in-depth interview with McGimpsey, where he discusses, with all the wit and keen critical acumen we’ve come to expect, everything from his early experiences growing up in Montreal’s East-End to the prospect of sympathy in and through poetry. Population Me is a timely addition to Canadian letters and a collection that makes clear McGimpsey’s significant contribution to contemporary Canadian literature.


CONTENTS


Introduction: The Sympathetic Core
ALESSANDRO PORCO


The Passion of David McGimpsey
NICK MOUNT


The Couch Poetato: Television People in the Poetry of David McGimpsey
JASON CAMLOT


Satiric Play in David McGimpsey’s Sport-Centered Poems
DAVID VANDERWERKEN


Objects, Still and Moving: Culture and Agency in the Short Fictions of David McGimpsey
L.E. VOLLICK


Codes of Maturity and the Impasse of Rock
ALESSANDRO PORCO


CanLit™: National Branding and Canadian Literary Identity in David McGimpsey’s Poetics
COURTNEY RICHARDSON


An Appetite Abroad; or, David McGimpsey’s Burgerworld and the Map of Contemporary Poetry
V. NICHOLAS LOLORDO


Disaster Poem
PAUL VERMEERSCH


On David McGimpsey’s Sitcom
ELIZABETH BACHINSKY


“Gone A-Whalin’”: An Interview with David McGimpsey
JASON CAMLOT AND ALESSANDRO PORCO