Lillian Necakov

Written as a vibrant discussion between Barwin and Necakov, this book-length poem takes us on a hypnagogic journey that examines many ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Although the work considers many themes, such as trauma, grief, anxiety, climate change, impending doom, war, illness, and cultural fragmentation, at its core, it argues for an unbridled creativity and beauty.

il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto. These responses to daily news and eclectic media posts encompass dogs (lots of them), Zambonis, jazz and blues, Jackie Gleason, mathematics, thermodynamics, and geography (real and imagined). These miniatures are Lillian Necakov's most spare poems, but each is jam-packed with explosives: anger, grief, love, need, and a foraging for ink.

Although firmly rooted in the real, Lillian Necakov's evocations of 'movie magic' prove irresistible in these forty poems and five collages. Ranging across dozens of films -- from Wim Wender's Wings of Desire and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law to Hitchcock's Rope and Hawks's To Have and Have Not --- Lillian Necakov's language, steeped in the comic of the banal, has absurdity for breakfast.