Karen Mac Cormack is a contemporary experimental poet. She holds dual British/Canadian citizenship, and lived for many years in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

; more recently, she moved to Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

, when her husband, the poet Steve McCaffery

Steve McCaffery

Steven McCaffery is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo . McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull. He moved to Toronto in 1968...

, was hired by SUNY-Buffalo

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...

 for the David Gray Chair.

Mac Cormack is the author of Straw Cupid (1987), Quirks & Quillets (1991), Marine Snow (1995), The Tongue Moves Talk (1997), At Issue (2001), Vanity Release (2003) and Implexures (part one, 2003; full-length publication forthcoming), as well as a collaboration with the British poet Alan Halsey

Alan Halsey

Alan Halsey is a British poet. He managed The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979 to 1997. Since 1997, Halsey has lived in Sheffield, working as a specialist bookseller and publishing West House Books....

, Fit to Print (2003). Though she was not directly part of the Language movement, her work shows many affinities with it, in its use of disjunctiveness

Logical disjunction

In logic and mathematics, a two-place logical connective or, is a logical disjunction, also known as inclusive disjunction or alternation, that results in true whenever one or more of its operands are true. E.g. in this context, "A or B" is true if A is true, or if B is true, or if both A and B are...

at a within-sentence and between-sentence level, and in her interest in the interrogation of cultural norms and ideologies through the skeptical reworking of "found" materials and genres. In Fit to Print, for instance, the poems mimic and distort the format and themes of a typical daily newspaper, while in At Issue the poems are quarried from the pages of women's fashion and beauty magazines. The prose pieces in the recent project Implexures are somewhat atypical in their use of biographical and autobiographical materials, especially a series of letters written from a variety of Mediterranean locations by an unnamed female traveller (possibly to be identified with the author, possibly not).