Cecily Nicholson + Michael Nardone at Massy Books

Join Cecily Nicholson and Michael Nardone May 28th for a special double reading!

May 28th, 7pm
Free Entry

CECILY NICHOLSON is a part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and works as the Interpretive Programmer for the Surrey Art Gallery. She is the author of Triage, From the Poplars, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, which won the 2018 Governor General’s award for poetry.

MICHAEL NARDONE is a poet and editor based in Montréal. He is the author of The Ritualites (2018) and Transaction Record (2014). His writings, dialogues, and editorial projects have been published widely and are archived at http://soundobject.net.

About Cecily Nicholson’s Wayside Sang:
“In this hypnotic suite of long poems, Cecily Nicholson makes room, offering glimpses and echoes of the Canadian landscape as she explores ideas of borders, identity, industry and travel. She offers a catalogue of impressions, a collage of the ephemeral, held together by image and the pulsing phrase that stays with you long after the journey’s over,” said the jury, Garry Gottfriedson, Sachiko Murakami and Patrick Warner, in a press release.

Praise for Michael Nardone’s The Ritualites:
“Nardone’s poetry unsettles territories as it roves through the continent, documenting the neon signs and the billboards, the dinner table conversations, and the overheard terrors of everyday Americana. The book orchestrates unlikely and compelling movements between abstracted, parodic narrative and lyric elegy, which Nardone writes as modulated, cerebral laments for an era’s failure to reach utopia. The poems map what we drive towards, driven mad, driving round the bends in form and through the American landscape— from Pennsylvania to South Dakota to Nevada. Witnessing geographic movement as a kind of living trespass, The Ritualites impressed upon me the need for re-tuning poetry’s ethnographic ear, for transposing attention away from calcified ‘identity’ and toward living, throbbing practices of civilian life across the United States.

“Nardone’s verses seem to take their cue from Muriel Rukeyser’s citational, attentive documentation of the embodied devastations of corporatized and industrialized belts. In his parodic, aloof prose, the critical lathe seems poised to spin Lisa Robertson’s claim in her succinct poem “Envoy”: “analysis too is a style of affect.” Episodic and variegated, the book’s many voices are by turns ventriloquial and verisimilitudinous— sometimes welcoming a careful and attuned ear, sometimes shunning it; sometimes asking for sympathetic leaning, sometimes ironic distance. This is a book that wants the reader to be many-splendored and nimble. My hope has always been for poets to subscribe not to movements or schools of aesthetics, but to be the bearers of urgent form— form as a thing to be broken and held close, at once. Nardone’s collection seems to carry that urgency, seems to know artifice for what it is—a holding pattern for thought’s flight, so it can land in a stranger place, further, always, from the comforts of habit and home.”
–Divya Victor, author of Kith

“Transcription precedes essence. Michael Nardone’s The Ritualites explores writing as an interface for the found’s sounds, made new by his ingenious and generative ear, novel forms, and wry sense of humours.”
–Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss

“The Ritualites is a spellbinding collection of North America’s sonic architecture and Nardone is a poet of its topologies, listening to the air when the body stops. The Ritualites is the jukebox of place; embodied leakages of the night, the shout, the cry and the laughter. A poetics of what language lays bare: little panic breaths, sound permitted in a cell. In The Ritualites, Nardone reminds us that language is wielded and listening is a verb.”
–Jordan Scott, author of Night & Ox

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.