Genevieve Lehr & Margo Wheaton, Poetry Reading
Friday November 18, 2016  7pm - 8pm (1 Hour)
Literary

 boxofdelightsbooks@gmail.com
 9025429511

Join us at the bookshop on November 18th at 7pm for an evening of poetry that is twice as nice! Genevieve Lehr and Margo Wheaton will both read from their latest collections of poetry, and their books will also be available for sale and signing.

"Stomata," Genevieve Lehr’s second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These losses include immediate deaths, Alzheimer’s, abuse, cancer, and—in a remarkable poem—residential schools, and they activate a potent spirituality that calls on a full range of imagistic resources.

As a grief book, Stomata is remarkable for its energy and range. While it honours and remembers the lost, it is always charged with a sense of a mystic power deriving from them. “In a conversation between Homer and Hermes, loss was found to be a gift,” writes Lehr. The result is the poetic experience of a vitalistic universe in which “Metamorphosis is everywhere”: a grief-enhanced rather than a grief-stricken vision. In Lehr’s poems, one keeps being struck by a simultaneity of mundane and cosmic, as can be see in the first lines of her opening long poem: “In the latter half of the third quarter of the waning moon / I sit at the table drinking tea.”

This is a book that is constantly provocative, alive with spirit and a restless energy in the face of disaster.

Praise for Stomata’s opening long poem:

“… One can return again and again … and still discover new insights. The range of reference is wide and surprising—Nâzim Hikmet, Bobbie Gentry, Milarepa, St. Francis—the language dissociative, the rhythms often raw and out of order. There’s something elevated, germinal, fascinating here.” — Jury Citation from The Malahat Review’s 2015 Long Poem Prize

http://www.brickbooks.ca/bookauthors/genevieve-lehr/

About Margo Wheaton's "Unlit Path Behind the House"

Sensuous, atmospheric, and spare, The Unlit Path Behind the House collects poems that seek light in difficult places. In lines filled with an intense music, Margo Wheaton listens for the lyricism inside the day’s blessings and catastrophes.

Wheaton’s poems sing at the intersections where public and private worlds collide: the steady cadence of a boy carrying an unconscious girl in his arms, the afternoon journey of a woman taking books to prisoners, the rhythmic breathing of a homeless man asleep in a parking lot. In these works, fireflies pulse in the dark, lovers clasp and unclasp, and street signs sing like Blake’s angels. Deeply informed by the natural world, Wheaton’s writing is marked by great meditative depth; while passionately engaged, these poems evoke a field of mystery and stillness.

Whether exploring themes of isolation, spiritual dispossession, desire, or the sanctity of daily rituals, The Unlit Path Behind the House conveys our longing for home and the different ways we try to find it.

Read more here:

http://www.mqup.ca/unlit-path-behind-the-house--the-products-9780773546776.php#!prettyPhoto
Pricing & Tickets
Pricing: Free