That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection—what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated problems: error, insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects such as fear and avoidance. “A Branch of Happen,” the opening section of award-winning poet Margaret Christakos’ collection, explores interior listening to both the self as sensation machine and the collaged external soundscape we both hear and fail to hear within the assailing violences and inequities of the news. A second suite, “Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk,” is troubled by memories of deceased loved-ones amid the North Saskatchewan River valley and the many-layered history of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). The fragmentary “Listening Line Notebook” multiplies the treatment of listening as a situated perceptual, sensory, and ethical process. A final long poem called “The Incubation” navigates ideas of being asleep and awake, altered and attuned, as well as spiritually dis/located in time and space. Poised within and beyond both established and emergent traditions of ecocriticism, contemporary feminisms, and experimental lyric, this intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace.

Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. Born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario, she has worked as a poet, writer, editor, instructor, and poetry-culture builder in Toronto since the late 1980s. Her body of work includes nine collections of poetry, numerous chapbooks, a novel, and an inter-genre memoir. She has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and is a recipient of the ReLit Award for poetry and the Bliss Carman Award. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos was published in 2017 (Laurier Poetry series). She has held appointments as Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University, London Public Library, and the University of Alberta. She is associate faculty with the MFA program in creative writing at University of Guelph-Humber and has taught widely as a sessional, most recently at Ryerson University. In 2018–2019, she was Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, University of Toronto. She has three adult children and lives in Toronto.

Margaret Christakos' profile page

"...Christakos’ poems across That Audible Slippage attend to deep listening: the sights and sounds of light, politics, birds, students, trees, contemporaries, radios and silence itself. The effect is delicate, pointed and polyvocal..." rob mclennan's blog, May 17, 2024 [Full post at https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2024/05/margaret-christakos-that-audible.html]

"For maximum benefit, read That Audible Slippage out loud. It's a listening party: you will hear the whirr of birds, the click of Facebook posts, and a radical mind awake to its own listenings and jostlings within the rivers of the body and the body of the world. However you read this book, take it in, you will feel yourself hearing anew. Rest awhile in this consciousness." Ronna Bloom, poet

"Within That Audible Slippage each measure of the text invites a deeper hearing in an entrancing dance of sounds vividly musical and politically astute. Twinned ironic anchors of popular culture and natural silence yield by turns whispers, yells, and experience." Sheila Murphy, author of Permission to Relax

"Christakos uses sound, the slip of the tongue into and out of liminal states in order to bear witness to snowy walks, environmental degradation, corporate impunity...” melanie brannagan frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press, July 27, 2024 [Full review: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/2024/07/27/assonance-accentuates-reflections-on-nature]