An afternoon with Eleonore Schönmaier: Rush of Wingspan

Please join us in ABC Amsterdam for the presentation of Eleonore Schönmaier's poetry collection Rush of Wingspan.
About this Event

Please join us in ABC Amsterdam for the presentation of Eleonore Schönmaier's poetry collection . Eleonore will read her poems, answer questions, and sign her book afterwards.
About the book:
In Rush of Wingspan (McGill-Queen's University Press), Eleonore Schönmaier explores three great forests of her life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, she reveals beauty and loss in equal measure in these poems.
Wildlife appears at regular intervals, never when expected. In Schönmaier's boreal forest childhood, she witnesses human and environmental exploitation and lives a life of labour. In a moment of joy, a canoe transforms into a sled. As she moves into adulthood, music creates a pulse to her life and her poems. In a heatwave, two pianists perform Wasserklavier in a botanical garden. A singer works in the Dutch resistance. A Greek composer creates love songs. An organist rides the rear carrier of a bicycle. Turkish composer Fazıl Say performs his Black Earth.
Goldfinches, blue-winged teals, blue herons, and flickers inhabit the pages of Rush of Wingspan. The soundscape of these poems is intimate in scale – about nature, art, animals, cycling – chamber music more than opera. Love is the blue-river thread in the warp and weft of the collection. Schönmaier's focus on planetary and human rights is the red-blood contrast.

About the author:
Eleonore Schönmaier is a Canadian poet who was born and raised in a northern wilderness settlement. Her latest collection is Rush of Wingspan (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026). Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (MQUP, 2021) was also the source for composer Michalis Paraskakis' music-theater work that premiered at the Athens Epidaurus Festival in 2025. Wavelengths of Your Song (MQUP, 2017) was also published in German translation as Wellenlängen deines Liedes (parasitenpresse, 2020). Dust Blown Side of the Journey (MQUP, 2017) was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards 2020 (Greece). Eleonore has won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, the National Broadsheet Contest, and was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize 2024, among others. Her poetry has been widely anthologized in the United States and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry. Multiple composers have set her poetry to music including Dorothy Chang, Panos Gklistis, Emily Doolittle, and Carmen Braden.