Karen Mac Cormack's "At Issue" is a sequel of sorts to "Fit to Print" (also from Coach House Books), her collaborative poetic examination of the newspaper with British poet Alan Halsey. In "At Issue, " Mac Cormack examines the format and contents of the lifestyle magazine.
Utilizing the vocabulary and spelling found in "Vogue" (both British and American versions), "Self" (a health/fitness magazine geared to female readership) and "Prevention" (another health magazine), the poems in "At Issue "reflect and refract the experience of reading these magazines. (Mac Cormack notes that an interesting - if frightening - fact is that there are fewer typos in "Vogue" than in most scholarly books published in North America.) As an alternative to the 'mined' creativity of the magazine poems, Mac Cormack also includes a number of texts from other sources.