Ballast

by Karen Houle

Karen Houle's Ballast draws us in to a strange, elliptical world. Houle's poems are often ordeals deriving their materials from the natural world; they form an archive, an entomology, geology, and ornithology. They are about spaces, about contact, about the position of objects, and about relationships. And they are spoken with a voice forceful in its intelligence, explosive in its language, and so inventive as to signal the arrival of an important new Canadian poet.

96 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Karen Houle is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Canada. Her university degrees focused first on biology, then history & philosophy of science, and finally political philosophy. She is the author of numerous articles on the following thinkers: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Spinoza, Jacques Derrida, & Luce Irigaray, and the following subjects: animality, plant ontology, micropolitics, friendship, copyright, & reproductive technology.

With Jim Vernon (York University), she co-edited a book of essays on Hegel and Deleuze (2013, Northwestern). Houle recently completed a monograph titled Toward a New Image of Thought: Responsibility, Complexity and Abortion (2013, Lexington Press, Outsources Series). She is the author of two books of poetry: Ballast (published in 2000 by House of Anansi Press) and During (published in 2005 by Gaspereau Press), and numerous essays on and about art and art making in non-academic venues. She is also the translator (from French to English, & with the help of Melissa Chong and Pegless Barrios) of Le Quan Ninh's (2011) collection of aphorisms and short essays on musical improvisation entitled "Improvising Freely: The ABC's of An Experience." (Publication Studio, PS Guelph).