Effy Morris

Effy Morris is a PhD candidate in Concordia University’s English department. S/he/y researches contemporary lyric poetry, specifically, how apostrophe’s grammatical constructions interface and mediate the regulatory conditions of Western socioeconomic power structures. S/he/y focuses on writers who invite precarity into language and use the radicality of poetics to subvert readability.

Effy’s research considers how poets engage media to refute quotation and visual reproduction. For example, s/he/y argues that Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s use of early word processor text, along with unconventional formatting and punctuation (self-called “sycorax video style”), subverts unwelcome legibility, thereby divesting from linguistic and interlocutive sovereignty. By refusing the call, or rather being otherwise to the position of answering, “sycorax video style” enacts a lyrical (and revolutionary) grammatical shift.

Effy is the recipient of a Fonds de recherche du Québec scholarship for doctoral research. S/he/y is the co-founder and co-editor of the interdisciplinary magazine 

O BOD.