Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Ottawa (BookThug) Launch for Christine McNair, Erin Robinsong + Jennifer Still

BookThug invites you to celebrate the launch of 3 new books of poetry: Charm by Christine McNair, Comma by Jennifer Still and Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong!

Saturday, June 10th
Montgomery Centretown Legion, Lower Hall
330 Kent St., Ottawa, ON
7pm-10pm
Hosted by Brecken Hancock.

Free and all are welcome. Cash bar.
Books will be available for sale.
All washrooms and hallways in the legion are fully accessible. We regret that there are two steps down into the lower hall.

Charm, the second collection by poet Christine McNair, considers the craftwork of conception from a variety of viewpoints—from pregnancy and motherhood, to how an orchid is pollinated, to overcoming abusive relationships, to the manual artistry of carving a violin bow or marbling endpapers. Through these works, McNair’s poetic line evolves as if moving in a spellbound kaleidoscope, etched with omens, fairytales, intimacy’s stickiness, and the mothering body.

The ecological is personal; the personal is ecological. Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong is a pulsating meditation on this most intimate relationship. These poems inject pleasure deep into the tissues of our language and state, countering fatalist narratives with the intimacy of entanglement and engagement.

Between 2008 and 2014, while her brother was in a lengthy coma, award-winning poet Jennifer Still engaged in a private collaboration with the art and wonder that was his handwritten field guide of prairie grasses. The result: the stunning works of poetry and imagery encapsulated in Comma. Still was moved by an overarching impulse of grief to create these poems. In the brittle lexicon of botany, and in the hum of the machines keeping her brother alive, she developed a hands-on method of composition that plays with the possibilities of what can be ‘read’ on a page. Comma enacts a state of transformation and flux, all in an effort to portray the embodiment of grief and regeneration that can be achieved in the physical breakdown and reassembly of lyric poetic forms.

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