Book Launch: ZOM-FAM by Kama La Mackerel

Massy Arts Society and Metonymy Press are pleased to invite you to a special virtual book launch for Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian poet Kama La Mackerel’s debut collection ZOM-FAM. La Mackerel will be joined by author Jillian Christmas for this Vancouver stop in a cross-country tour.

Registration mandatory: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_owtgnIgQRpWv8clApIAA-Q?fbclid=IwAR2py95re2DF5irywGivXLd_gxAS6DRj-T2vTS6waajQDK4m4SISBN_cQcw

In their debut poetry collection, Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self amidst the legacy of colonial silences. Multiply voiced and imbued with complex storytelling, ZOM-FAM showcases a fluid narrative that summons ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages, and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which grapple with the legacy of plantation servitude.

Striking, vivid, tender, intimate, and political, ZOM-FAM is a beautifully wrought journey that articulates a contemporary decolonial poetics and offers a roadmap for colonized and displaced queer and trans voices to (re)imagine themselves into being.

ZOM-FAM is available for purchase through independent bookstore Massy Books, with delivery options available for across Canada and the USA. https://bit.ly/3ewF5k9

Kama’s work has been published in the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (2015) and We Mark Your Memory: writings from descendants of indenture (2018). Their translation of Kai Cheng Thom’s From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea was published in French by Éditions Dents de Lion in spring 2019 and their co-translation of Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men was published in French by éditions du Remue-Ménage in winter 2020.

JILLIAN CHRISTMAS is a queer, afro-caribbean writer living on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam people (Vancouver, BC), where she works as Speaker Coordinator at Cicely Blain Consulting, Spoken word curator of the Vancouver Writers Fest, and formerly served for six years as artistic director of Verses Festival of Words. She has won numerous Grand Poetry Slam Championship titles and represented both Toronto and Vancouver at eleven national poetry events, notably breaking ground as the first Canadian to perform on the final stage of the Women of the World Poetry Slam.  She has presented poetry and theory in a multitude of venues including the BC Civil Liberties gala, the SFU 2018 grad conference closing keynote, and numerous panels focused on the intersections of critical race theory and contemporary art. She is the author of The Gospel of Breaking (Arsenal Pulp Press 2020).