Poetry w/ Sarah Wolfson, James Crews, Kasia Juno, Laura Zacharin
Join us Thursday, February 27th as we welcome Sarah Wolfson, and Laura Zacharin for the launch of their latest and an evening of poetry readings with guests James Crews and Kasia Juno at La Petite Drawn & Quarterly!
The poems in A COMMON NAME FOR EVERYTHING are concerned primarily with the holiness of rural spaces. They build idiosyncratic worlds around the themes of nature, home, parenting, and naming. They can be both poignant and absurd: a professional namer of lakes explains his standards; new mothers are given gifts of mammoths; the rural gods are given names; a study of sheep results in loneliness. In the places these poems build, wandering is a state of being, and nostalgia for home has no balm. Steeped in sound play and borrowing academic language to create a specimen lens, these poems bask in the local as they seek to name even the commonest earthly things.
In COMMON BROWN HOUSE MOTHS, poems step back from the hurry, blur and ordinariness to take a closer look at the the hazards of daily life . From her work as a doctor and everyday family life, first time author, Laura Zacharin considers themes of memory, change, Illness, recovery and loss. A variety of poetic forms, uses energy of these forms to engage with encounter and experience. Sometimes with humour, always with stark honesty, and often indirectly, Zacharin uses ordinary language for clarity and immediacy in this elegant and imagistic collection rife with emotional pull.
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SARAH WOLFSON is the author of the poetry collection A Common Name for Everything (Green Writers Press). Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Fiddlehead, TriQuarterly, PRISM international, CV2, AGNI, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was named a notable poem in Best Canadian Poetry 2019. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University.
Originally from Montreal LAURA ZACHARIN currently lives in Toronto. In 2018 Laura completed her Creative Writing Certificate at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and received the Marina Nemat Poetry Award. She was a finalist in 2018 for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Poetry Contest. In 2017 she attended the Emerging Writer’s Intensive at the Banff Centre. Her poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, CV2, The Malahat Review and Juniper. Her first book Common Brown House Moths was published in September 2019 (Frontenac House).
JAMES CREWS is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of What Stays, winner of the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and Telling My Father, winner of the 2017 Cowles Prize. He is also editor of several anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, published by Green Writers Press and chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as her monthly book selection for the Poetry Foundation, and Queer Nature: An Ecopoetry Anthology, forthcoming from Autumn House Press in 2021. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, New York Times Magazine, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among dozens of other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. He lives on part of an organic farm with his husband in Vermont and teaches creative writing at SUNY-Albany.
KASIA VAN SCHAIK is the author of the poetry chapbook Sea Burial Laws According to Country (Desert Pets Press, 2018) and her writing has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology (2015), Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Prism International, Jacket2, and more. Kasia received the Quebec Writer’s Federation Short Story Prize (2009) and was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize (2017). She lives in Montreal where she is completing a PhD at McGill University.
Find her at @kasiajuno or at www.kasiajuno.weebly.com