CURIO: Grotesques & Satires From the Electronic Age is Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ellusive first book of poetry. Published just prior to Home of Sudden Service, a collection that went so far in another direction as to be nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2006, CURIO offers a very different view of what Bachinsky is capable of as a poet, and invites her readers to consider a much wider vision of her work as a whole. No one can truly hope to understand her work without reading this volume. Witness Antonin Artaud climbing a beanstalk and eating his lover’s foot, as his most torrid affair is revealed in letters; fear the Spy Cam’s omniscient eye; test your paranoiac tendencies as an alien abductee; watch as The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender; rejoice in poems without people, poems without authors, and poems with no audience. Informed by the writings of the 20th century’s (and even the 21st's!) most eclectic authors, CURIO is quirky and sly-an ironic mixture simultaneously engaged with formal innovation and a retro avant garde that heralded the arrival of a brave new poet. From publisher description.
