95 Books In 2006, George W. Bush read 95 books. We will do better.

All of these books are linked for me as I’ve read them all for my Canadian Feminist Poetry class. 

Rita Wong’s Forage is a sharp and intelligent book of political poetry looking at the problematics of globalism and transnational capital. Wong looks at the clash of cultures: national, linguistic, capitalist, agricultural. The poems move like seeds blowing across fields, confounding monocultures and complicating the underlying sameness and organization of globalist constructions, which, though they look multicultural, are often only as tolerant as the people who accept the ideological foundations of capitalism. Wong’s book prompted me to read Vandana Shiva’s Biopiracy, which is a short, interesting, and accessible book dealing with the patenting of life and the issues surrounding genetic engineering and the capitalist enclosure of life at its most micro levels.

I’m going to add to the pile of Erin Moure books that have been posted on 95 Books with O Cidadan and My Beloved Wager. O Cidadan is Moure’s look at the issues surrounding borders and barriers in a globalist world where borders are supposed to be vanishing, but are only vanishing to the movement of goods. Moure posits a citizen (or cidadan to use her word) as the one who passes across borders, complicating them, and the book reflects this by asking the reader to move between borders into other books and between genres and languages in this book. My Beloved Wager is a book of essays by Moure where she writes about many of her ideas and books. Her sharp sense of humour is visible throughout, but especially in essays that deviate from expected topics like translation or citizenship. Who can resist an essay with the title “Poets Amid the Management Gurus?”

-ryan