About this Event
Join us for a double launch of Anna Swanson's The Garbage Poems and Charlie Petch's Infinite Audition! With special guests Qurat Dar and M'yz, hosted by Alayna Munce.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
In The Garbage Poems, poems that repurpose the language of beer cans and fast-food wrappers to explore everything from chronic illness to climate crisis to the joy of wild swimming. Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing a voice together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.
Part poetry book, part theatre audition resource, Infinite Audition reflects a transmasculine and disabled experience of the world in a voice that is funny, humane and rooted in deep authenticity. Infinite Audition is a work that explores all spoken word poetry can be. The sections range from solo performance, to musical, dance and puppetry collaborations, to monologues and audition pieces for trans and non-binary actors from Petch's theatrical and operatic works. Each poem is its own little world: sometimes it is the voice of a hotel, a closet, Medusa's serpent, or surgically removed body parts out for a night on the town. Expect only the unexpected.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Anna Swanson (she/her) is a queer writer and librarian. Her first book, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010), won a Lambda Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. The Garbage Poems is her second collection, published this fall by Brick Books. Her writing has been widely published in journals and appears in anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry, Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, and Torah: A Women’s Commentary. She recently completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives in St. John’s on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), where she works as a poetry editor for Riddle Fence Magazine. Her special interests include collective liberation, a Free Palestine, and wild swimming in all seasons.
Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for the speakNORTH national festival, winner of the Sheri-D Golden Beret Award from The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. Their debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named "Best of 2021" by The Walrus. Their film with Opera QTO, Medusa's Children, premièred 2022. They have been featured on the CBC's Q, were the Writer In Residence for Berton House (2023), were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021. Their solo show "No one's special at the hot dog cart" debuted at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2024.
Cassandra Myers (My’z) (they/she/he) is an award winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, and counselor from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra’s work has won national literary and spoken word titles including the National Magazine GOLD Award in Poetry and Champion of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Find them @cass.myers.poetry or at cassmyers.com
Qurat Dar was Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) National Champion. Her poetry has been published by Arc, Room, and Canthius, and shown at the Art Gallery of Mississauga and across the TTC network.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Another Story Bookshop, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
