Poetry. A vibrant collage of voices, MASQUE plays with the personal and the persona in a challenging exploration of media constructs and their effects on one family's private life. Stretching the limits of poetry, MASQUE features a cast of twenty-five, including the father, the sister, the philosopher, the Jew, Germaine Greer, the fan, the lesbian, and the writer. Zolf weaves found text with poetry, creating rich, often humourous, tableaux that resonate with colorful characters and surprising insights into the fraught spaces where the public stops and the private begins. "Calling MASQUE a straightforward bildungsroman would be like calling Nicole Brossard's MAUVE DESERT a travel book. MASQUE is a rich and layered confection as informed by linguistic playfulness as it is by the confessional. Zolf proves that there are ways to write about the familiar and the familial that handily defeat both terms"--R.M. Vaughan.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Rachel Zolf is a poet and editor from Toronto who is presently living in New York. Her third full-length book, HUMAN RESOURCES, won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Award. Previous collections include Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books), MASQUE (The Mercury Press) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). She was the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine and has edited several books of poetry. NEIGHBOUR PROCEDURE (Coach House Books, 2010) is her most recent book.