Concetta Principe

Mad Speculations: Anne Carson’s Messiahs and the Canadian Unconscious gives us a new way of looking at Canadian literature and its unconscious relation to Canadian cultural, political and historical landscapes. Written in accessible language, geared to appeal to undergrad and emeritus alike, it makes intriguing observations and sometimes provocative speculations about what Carson’s mad messiahs can say about the Canadian unconscious. Author Concetta Principe sidesteps the usual interest in Carson’s postmodern experiments to focus on her engagement with religion and, specifically, the iconic saviour of the past: the messiah. But Carson’s messiah is atypical, a figure of salvation grafted to the Jamesonian revolutionary schizophrenic, its task to deconstruct grand narratives. Do her messiahs do that? Taking a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the function of the messiah in Carson’s texts, Mad Speculations identifies Carson’s very conscious commitment to undermining mental health stigmas. Her messiahs show us an unconscious engagement with Canadian myths as rooted in historical moments such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the trial of Louis Riel. This book also ponders how Carson’s work unconsciously conserves that Canadian cultural tendency to centre the story around the white Anglo-Protestant settler situated in a literary nowhere. This is the first volume in Reimagining Canada, a new series.

Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence ? a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home.

Stars Need Counting by Concetta Principe meditates on questions of suicide in the mode of A. Alvarez, when he says, in A Savage God, that there are no answers to these questions, because suicide is a ?closed world? ? so closed that it's not our place to judge or cast shame. These essays explore the quality of what is closed about this world, bring it close enough to scrape the shame off the act, and for both those who have passed and those who survive, offer peace.

Concetta Principe's deeply intimate walking explores religious difference and secular politics, God and promises through the meditative lens of prose poetry. walking occurs in the mind through dreams, in memory and as a relentless process of bearing witness to the earthly, quotidian activities that challenge super-natural abstractions. As the unconverted pilgrim of the book eats nothing, she is led through these poems into encounters with God, birds, stones, and other humans who inhabit the stairways and closed doors of Jerusalem. Together, this collection of prose poems functions as a revelatory maze of mystery and discovery.