On Sunday, June 25 at 3pm, join Massy Arts, Coach House Books and Palimpsest Press for a reading and launch of three poetry collections by three formidable talents; Catriona Wright, Meghan Kemp-Gee, and Michelle Brown.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
About the Books
Continuity Errors – Catriona Wright
Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care. Continuity Errors questions the privileging of work and productivity over rest and care from an ecological and feminist perspective. Written before and immediately after the birth of her first child, these poems try to imagine the future her son will inherit. Encounters with an unusual cast of characters – including lonely cryptids, unrepentant grifters, and persistent ghosts – provide incomplete answers, and while the continuity errors keep multiplying around her, Wright pauses to consider whether our devotion to innovation is keeping us stuck.
Animal in the Room – Meghan Kemp-Gee
Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumés: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history. Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body – really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, orb-weaver spiders, horseshoe crabs, the Greenland shark, ravens, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.
Michelle Brown’s second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada’s catchiest lyric poets.
With Authors:
Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her short stories have appeared in Geist, Joyland, Grain, The New Quarterly, and Room. Her poems have appeared in Prism International, Prairie Fire, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 and 2018. She is the poetry editor for The Puritan and a co-founder of Desert Pets Press.
Meghan Kemp-Gee writes poetry, comics, and scripts of all kinds. She has also worked as a writing teacher, screenplay consultant, and ultimate frisbee coach. She received her BA from Amherst College and MA and MFA from Chapman University. She currently lives somewhere between Vancouver and Fredericton, where she is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick.
Michelle Brown’s first full-length collection of poetry, Safe Words, was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit award. A finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season award, CV2’s Young Buck Prize and the CBC Poetry Prize, her work has also appeared in The Walrus, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, PRISM International and The Puritan. After nearly a decade in Toronto, Michelle has recently returned to the West Coast, where she hangs out with her daughter, dog & husband.