FESTIVAL 2025

The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet

by Irene Marques

Mawenzi House

FESTIVAL 2025

The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet

by Irene Marques

Mawenzi House

Synopsis

The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet is a collection of poetry that reveals an all-consuming yearning: the desire to find a language that can tell the most about our existence. What the poet asks for, works obsessively to tap into, is a native tongue, a vernacular that bypasses the traps of a supposed rationality and objectivity forged in a body-politic consumed by self-interests that reduce our ontological experience. The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet calls for an activation of our primary ways of seeing that perceive spontaneously, without deliberation, which have been subdued by the material beneficiaries of our world and deemed non-intelligent. The poems invite us to re-enter our truly bare bones—our empty, sparkling space—before the codified verb, with its imposed grammar, placed us in a consented incarceration. The poet endeavours to uncover the bare alphabets we must return to—the redeeming letters—where the possibility of rebirth resides, for all and everything that has been annihilated by an unethical rhetoric, a verbosity of lies, engendered through undemocratic paradigms crafted by humans.

About the Author

Irene Marques is a bilingual writer (writing in English and Portuguese) and Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University in the Department of English. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, Masters in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto, and a Social Work Degree from TMU. She has published eight books in various genres (novel, poetry, short fiction and academic). Her most recent works include the poetry collection The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet (Mawenzi House, 2024), and the novels Daria (Inanna Publications, 2021) and Uma Casa no Mundo (Imprensa Nacional, 2021), which won Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro Prize in Portugal. www.irenemarques.net

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