Poetry Launch: Christine Wu and Jessica Bebenek
22 May,2025 at 19:00 – 21:30 EDT
Thursday, May 22, 2025, 7:00–9:30 pm ET
mai/son (DM hosts for address)
Join Christine Wu and Jessica Bebenek for the Montreal launch of their poetry collections, Familial Hungers by Wu (Brick Books) and No One Knows Us There by Bebenek (Book*hug Press).
Featuring guest reader Liz Howard and musical guest Andrew Whiteman.
BYOB
Admission is free. All are welcome to attend.
Message Jessica Bebenek at @notyrmuse or Christine Wu at @homemadepoem on Instagram for the address.
About No One Knows Us There
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.
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 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism. No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry.
About Familial Hungers
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.
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.