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Join us for the Toronto launch of No One Knows Us There by Jessica Bebenek and familial hungers by Christine Wu! With Terese Mason Pierre.ABOUT THE BOOKS
Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing. At once sensual, visceral, and dreamlike, No One Knows Us There takes us from the sterility of the hospital into the sumptuous natural world. We face horror in a manicured garden and discover beauty in a suncapped lake. A theoretical mathematician leads us to an elk encounter, the crooked bodies of birds are found in the spring thaw, and we become our own pet snail in a mason jar. Ultimately, grief is radically transformed through plainspoken yet lyrical language, and this keen examination of trauma evolves into a striking celebration of the inevitability of change.
Myth , the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds ('real' and 'imaginary') unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre's poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: "The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely."
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CHRISTINE WU is a Chinese-Canadian poet who was born and raised on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver, BC). She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a MLIS from Dalhousie University, and a MA in English from the University of New Brunswick. In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and in 2022, she was shortlisted for the RBC Writers' Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She now lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) in Mi'kma'ki.
JESSICA BEBENEK is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She works as a risograph printer and bookmaker at Concordia University's Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. In 2021, Bebenek was a finalist for the Writers' Trust of Canada's Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of seven poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism . No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry.
TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus , ROOM , Brick , Quill & Quire , Uncanny , and Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction . Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers' Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers' Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur's biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto.
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315 Roncesvalles Avenue,Toronto,M6R 2M6,CA, Canada
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