In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative.

A brilliant, crazy, deliciously carnivalesque romp through the surreal landscape of our times.

Di Brandt, author of Glitter and Fall

Imagine if you will Louis Dudek or George Bowering as madly modernist poetry DJs, whipping up the crowd with remix shifts that keep the beats just ahead of everyone on the dance floor. In his innovative debut collection, Mark McCutcheon spins a melange of blues, pop, R&B, hip hop, even some dark heavy metal, in a wild mixtape of literary forms, imbedded quotations, and other voices.

Douglas Barbour, author of Listen. If

About the Author

Mark A. McCutcheon is professor of literary studies at Athabasca University. His scholarly publications include articles on such subjects as Canadian popular culture, Frankenstein adaptations, and copyright policy in English Studies in Canada, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Continuum, and Popular Music, among other scholarly journals and books. Mark has also published poetry and short fiction in literary magazines like EVENT, Existere, Carousel, and subTerrain. Originally from Toronto, Mark lives in Edmonton. His scholarly blog is academicalism.wordpress.com and he’s on Twitter as @sonicfiction.

Table of Contents

  1. Shadows the words
  2. Three votive candles
  3. Fifty more
  4. Here is where was
  5. Second of the night
  6. No family one pictures
  7. Grand parenthesis
  8. Where the area code ends
  9. Found and lost
  10. Take forever just a minute
  11. A sound outside the house
  12. A pantoum to smash pandas
  13. Anthropocene obscene as orange
  14. Room for one more
  15. The leaf is not the line
  16. Why the blue whale risked its neck
  17. Mab and Burke
  18. L’âme de l’homme est fait du papier
  19. Voyager 2, thinking, types things
  20. Lunar sonata
  21. Baby Bee explains Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
  22. Whose eyes are shut in every photo
  23. Heaven help the roses
  24. Forgive me Cathy for
  25. Ever
  26. The lineaments
  27. New patriot love
  28. You and you kiss the knife moon
  29. Grosvenor Road
  30. Shape your eyes by shutting them
  31. The space of one paragraph
  32. Was I asleep?
  33. The Pit of Carkoon
  34. Raver in the bathroom
  35. Like opening your refrigerator door
  36. This time the subway
  37. Speeches for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at The Base of a Crucifixion
  38. Nightmares in the university’s ruins
  39. Stranger music
  40. Ecstasy, Euphrasia
  41. In Gwen MacEwen Park
  42. Cash paradise
  43. Moon of a far planet
  44. Fuseli in Peru
  45. Notes
  46. Acknowledgements and publication credits