Life's Poetic Turns
Event Details
The intersections, reinventions, and growing pains we so often experience in life won’t keep these poets down. Featuring:
Beast at Every Threshold
Natalie Wee
A formidable collection of poems that deconstructs the notion of “otherness” through folklore and myth.
An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of “otherness” and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity – and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the “Beast at Every Threshold.”
Cane / Fire
Shani Mootoo
From internationally celebrated writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo comes Cane | Fire, an immersive and vivid collection that marks a long-awaited return to poetry.
Throughout this evocative, sensual collection, akin to a poetic memoir, past and present are in conversation with each other as the narrator moves from Ireland to San Fernando, and finally to Canada. The reinterpretations and translation of this journey and its associated family history give meaning to the present. Through these deeply personal poems, and Mootoo’s own artwork, we begin to understand how a life can not only be shaped, but even reimagined.
Heady Bloom
Andrew Faulkner
Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil.
Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: “If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows.” But don’t worry. Advil’s on the case and aims to find out.
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