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The event is a joint book launch of We Survived Until We Could Live by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike and Wound Archive by Anna Veprinska. Both poets will give a short reading from their books, followed by a conversation with Micheline Maylor-Kovitz, the City of Calgary’s former poet laureate, a Q&A, and lastly, book signings by both poets.
ABOUT THE BOOKS:
We Survived Until We Could Live
Who survives war? What does survival mean? And at what cost? Yes, the sirens and bombs have ceased. Yes, peace has settled over the rubble. But even in moments of laughter, ghosts chafe. Blood still smells in the air. The present is as fraught as the past, filled with shadows and fumes. Old wounds sting the body and the mind, rekindling nightmares and memory. In poetry by turns lyrical and intense, elegiac and intimate, We Survived Until We Could Live plumbs the contours of vulnerability, inviting readers to reflect on loss and the broken flesh. Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike skillfully uses multiple narrative voices and personas ?a father, a mother, a son?to show how postwar trauma and memory warp family relationships, how violence persists long after a war has ended. Umezurike doesn't turn away from contemplating the psychic and physical scars that war leaves on people, whether on the old or young, parents or children. These are poems of taut breath, silence, and echoes. These are also poems of love and its redemptive power. Poems of the courage to continue. Tender yet enduring snapshots of kindness, grace, hope, and resilience, reminding us of our capacity to emerge from the crushing shrouds of darkness and tragedy into the light.
Wound Archive
Wound Archive is a collection of minimalist poems that archives the wound left by the concurrent ending of a relationship and the beginning of a chronic invisible illness. These poems comprise a fragmented archive in which woundedness turns language (figuratively and at times formally) upside down. The symbol of the wound recurs throughout, punctuating the ways both heartbreak and illness are experienced in the body. While these poems are often rooted in the body, mouths, tongues, legs, they also employ the corporeal to reach for the incorporeal - god, ghosts, healing. This tender text articulates the capacity of brevity to hold the expansiveness of ache.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the 2025-2026 Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary, Canada. He is the author of Masculinities in Nigerian Fiction: Receptivity and Gender (2025) and of literary works such as We Survived Until We Could Live (2026), there’s more (2023), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (2021), and Wish Maker (2021/2025), and a co-editor of Please Don’t Interrupt (2025) and Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020).
Anna Veprinska has published three collections of poetry, Wound Archive (Gordon Hill Press, 2026), Bonememory (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and Sew with Butterflies (Steel Bananas, 2014). She is also the author of the monograph Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis, which received Honourable Mention in the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She was a finalist for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, has been twice shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, and won the Chinook Poetry Contest. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
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Event Venue
1302 4 St SW #100, Calgary, AB, Canada, Alberta T2R 0X8
Tickets
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