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Cosmic Dispersal: Three Poets on Rupture
May 30, 2019 @ 7:00 pm
Cosmic Dispersal: Three Poets on Rupture
Come hear three distinct voices share work touching on themes of rupture, home, belonging, violence, and love. Coming to us from Seattle (Shankar Narayan, author of Postcards from the New World), Toronto (Doyali Islam, author of heft), and here in Vancouver (Hasan Namir, author of War/Torn), each of these poets crosses literal and figurative borders through their work, examining the impact of politics, war, technology, and more on individual lives and communities. The poets will have their books/chapbooks for sale.
May 30th//7pm
Free Entry
About Doyali Islam and heft:
DOYALI ISLAM second poetry book is heft (McClelland & Stewart, 2019). Her poems have been published in Kenyon Review Online, The Fiddlehead, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and they have won several national contests and prizes. Doyali serves as the poetry editor of Arc Poetry Magazine. In 2017, she was a guest on CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition and was a poetry finalist for the National Magazine Awards. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
“heft deftly encompasses both personal and political through [Doyali Islam’s] innovative use of a bifurcated poem. Is it two wings built around a white silence? The scales of the balance of justice? The border between self and other? We enter each poem as if into an unknown world, already populated, but ready to welcome us. Come and sit inside these wings.” – Philip Metres
About Shankar Narayan:
Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2017 Flyway Sweet Corn Poetry Prize, and has been a fellow at Kundiman and at Hugo House. He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards From the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work as a civil rights attorney for the ACLU. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi. Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net.
About Hasan Namir and War/Torn:
Hasan Namir was born in Iraq in 1987 and came to Canada at a young age. He graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BA in English. His debut novel God in Pink won the Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction in 2016. He lives in Vancouver.
Namir’s debut collection of poetry, War / Torn, is a brazen and lyrical interrogation of religion and masculinity—the performance and sense of belonging they delineate and draw together. Namir summons prayer, violence, and the sensuality of love, revisiting tenets of Islam and dictates of war to break the barriers between the profane and the sacred.
This event is taking place on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh Nations.
Massy Books’ downstairs event space is accessible! You can view the floorplan here: http://www.massybooks.com/accessibility/
Please feel free to reach out with any inquiries.