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Not Every Gesture Is a Manifesto: An Interview with Michael Lista
Michael Lista is a twenty-something Toronto poet who, with his first collection, has managed an incredible thing. He has written a book that, without straying far into the political, the religious, or any of the more traditional means of rendering an insult, has an opportunity to make a lot of people very angry. His book, Bloom (Anansi 2010) has the power to piss people off on purely aesthetic grounds. Written as a series of poems that each take their structure, form, and often content or voice from a previously written piece (ranging back to 14th-century Pearl Poet and as close-at-hand as Karen Solie), Bloom tells the story of Louis Slotin. Slotin was a Canadian physicist who worked on The Manhattan Project and, amidst personal problems, died mysteriously during a routine procedure at his laboratory. Bloom is both dizzingly complex and completely readable. I loved it to bits.
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