Poetry. BENT AT THE SPINE offers a "pronoun"-ced frolic where the "you" is a disconnected third party--the reader is left in the position of an eavesdropper, or a listener, or a karmasurplus author. Its relentless interrogation resonates at an invigorating pace: cultural difference, different bodies, diffident accents, deafening rhymes. Sometimes rapturous, often vulvy, the poems audaciously teach "you" how to read them, allowing the last-minute-cram-session to be a delving, a plunging, a repeating discovery.
"Nicole Markotic has created a work of extravagant speech in BENT AT THE SPINE. As her title implies, the book is broken, the back contorted, yet the body o f language is recombined in new and surprising forms. In the tradition of Gertrude Stein's TENDER BUTTONS or Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge Markotic's book offers the pleasures of close listening and uncanny seeing. Or as she might say, 'a nod's as wonky as a tight-lipped pucker.'"--Michael Davidson

NICOLE MARKOTIĆ is a fiction writer and poet who has published two novels and two books of poetry. Her first novel, Yellow Pages: a Catalogue of Intentions, was a prose narrative about Alexander Graham Bell. She has also published two books of poetry, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, and a chapbook, more excess, which won the bpNichol Poetry Chapbook Award. A former resident of Calgary, she now teaches English Literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor. Dr. Markotic specializes in the subjects of Canadian Literature, Poetry, Children's Literature, Disability in Film and Disability in Literature and she wrote a critical book on disability in film. She is also the Managing Editor of the chapbook series, Wrinkle Press.