Adèle Barclay + Klara du Plessis Double Launch w/guest Tess Liem

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Adèle Barclay’s second book of poetry Renaissance Normcore and Klara Du Plessis’ chapbook of essays unfurl with special guest Tess Liem.

RENAISSANCE NORMCORE belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate, these poems are both abject and sweet as they repurpose loss into life and test the bounds of how much a poem can hold.

UNFURL: four essays.

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ADÈLE BARCLAY is the author of If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, which won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Renaissance Normcore is her second collection and was named a book to look out for by CBC and 49th Shelf. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and The Walrus’ 2016 Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Vallum, Cosmonauts Avenue, Room Magazine, The Puritan, Heavy Feather Review, glitterMOB, The Fiddlehead and elsewhere. She is Arc Magazine’s 2018-19 Poet in Residence and an editor at Rahila’s Ghost Press.

KLARA DU PLESSIS is a South African Canadian poet residing in Montreal. Her debut collection Ekke—winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award—was released from Palimpsest Press; and her Anstruther chapbook, Wax Lyrical,was shortlisted for the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Klara is a PhD English Literature student at Concordia University, and currently expanding her curatorial practice to include experimental Deep Curation poetry reading events.

TESS LIEM is a queer writer living in Montreal, Tiotia:ke—unceded Haudenosaunee and Mohawk territories. Her writing has appeared in Plenitude, Room Magazine, PRISM, and elsewhere. Her debut collection Obits. was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and recently won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for 2019.