West Coast Poetry Launch: Tara Borin, Molly Cross-Blanchard, Selina Boan, Terence Young & Dallas Hunt

Spring 2021 has brought us phenomenal new poetry collections. Join us for the West Coast launch featuring Tara Borin, Molly Cross-Blanchard, Selina Boan, Terence Young & Dallas Hunt!

How to attend:

Register through Crowdcast to attend: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/west-coast-poetry-launch/register

Tara Borin, The Pit
Available for purchase: https://bit.ly/3apkihi

In the melancholy atmosphere of the bar and the rooms upstairs, the speakers of Borin’s poems find unexpected solace and belonging. The habits, the routine, the regulars, the predictability of it all brings some kind of chaotic order to chaotic life

Molly Cross-Blanchard, Exhibitionist
Available for purchase: https://bit.ly/3n3KALj

One minute she’s drying her underwear on the corner of your mirror, the next she’s asking the sky to swallow her up: the narrator of Exhibitionist oscillates between a complete rejection of shame and the consuming heaviness of it. Painfully funny, brutally honest, and alarmingly perceptive, Molly Cross-Blanchard’s poems use humour and pop culture as vehicles for empathy and sorry-not-sorry confessionalism. What this speaker wants more than anything is to be seen, to tell you the worst things about herself in hopes that you’ll still like her by the end.

Selina Boan, Undoing Hours
Available for purchase: https://bit.ly/2QhTUPL

Selina Boan’s debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, considers the various ways we undo, inherit, reclaim and (re)learn. Boan’s poems emphasize sound and breath. They tell stories of meeting family, of experiencing love and heartbreak, and of learning new ways to express and understand the world around her through nêhiyawêwin.

Terence Young, Smithereens
Available for purchase: https://bit.ly/3guyx8u

In Smithereens, Terence Young ranges widely among forms, subjects, tones and moods, invoking the domestic world of family and home, as well as the associated realms of work and play. He describes the simple pleasure of losing one’s bearings and seeing the world anew in “Tender is the Night,” and in “The Bear” he records the near-magical appearance at a summer cabin of a creature that hasn’t been seen in the area in over fifty years. The ironic benefits of a house fire, the late-night sounds of a downtown alley, the smells of a summer morning in the Gulf islands—all of these serve as vehicles for reminiscence, meditation and humour.

Dallas Hunt, Creeland
Available for purchase: https://bit.ly/3dyC1Vv

Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing—or at least attempting to.

The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try—and ultimately fail—to articulate them.