Rob Winger Reads At Michael Ondaatje Reading Series, Toronto
Posted: Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Rob Winger, author of Muybridge's Horse (Nightwood Editions, $13.95), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award, will be reading at the Michael Ondaatje Reading Series in the BMO Conference Room of Glendon Hall at Glendon College in Toronto, Ontario on Wednesday, March 19th at 4:30pm.
Part history, part invention, Muybridge's Horse is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth- century British-born photographer whose studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures.
Searching out stereoscopic beauty, Winger's version of Muybridge carries portable darkrooms from the heights of Yosemite's domes to the depths of the North and South American coastlines, and ultimately onto an 1878 race track, where a battery of fifty cameras settles a bet about a horse's stride, forever changing the world's understanding of movement.
Charged with murder, accused of neurosis, compelled to record ruins and wage-slavery, Muybridge conveys the violence implied by the photographic act and the blunt details hidden behind our histories. Elegantly told, Muybridge's Horse is an evocative exploration of history, personal obsession, passion and negatives.
ROB WINGER grew up in a tiny Ontario town, and has since lived in eastern Canada and Asia.His work has been published in literary journals across the country, and selections from Muybridge's Horse won first prize for poetry in English in the 2003 CBC Literary Awards judged by P.K. Page, Dionne Brand and George Bowering. Currently at work at a doctoral degree in English and cultural studies,Winger lives with his family in Ottawa, Ontario, where he skates to work each winter.