The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is 'a public organ of private damage.' The poems in Excessive Love Prostheses confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual.
Excessive Love Prostheses takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker's Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.
Coach House Books, 2002
On Excessive Love Prostheses:
The Danforth Review, Jennifer Dales, 2003: “Christakos explores motherhood, hetero- and bi-sexuality, the lives of oddball characters and the struggles of adult life through intense, emotionally alive verse and prose poetry, which she continually turns inside-out and upside-down by repeating fragments of poems in connection with their wholes.”
“Women of Words.” The Globe and Mail, Sonnet L’Abbe, Nov 2, 2002: “The sum of Christakos's work is, in many instances, as formally and conceptually brave as internationally celebrated Montreal poet Anne Carson's; maybe this book will be the one to snap the recognition gods to attention.”
The Georgia Straight, Billeh Nickerson, Sept 2002: “[It] begs the question, Is Margaret Christakos the love child of David Cronenberg and the queen of the confessional poets, Sharon Olds? … Much of this writing shocks for its originality.”
The Calgary Herald, 2002: “Beautifully restrained poetry shot through with sardonic humour and rendered even more interesting by Christakos’s seriously playful manipulations of language.”
Quill & Quire, Patrick Woodcock, July 2002: “Christakos is a talented poet who is capable – as many poems in this collection illustrate – of writing beautifully about even the most tragic of situations.”
“What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Poetics.ca #2, rob mclennan, June 2003: “Christakos’ poems are built like microcircuitry – no matter how close you get, there is still another level of breaking down, of weaving and intricate movement. There are no flat surfaces, or endings here. She knows how to fragment the poem and then widen, scalpel and explore her life, and the language of her life in art, in an increasingly generative series of texts, defining and redefining.”
Winner of the ReLit Award for Poetry.