Book Launch for Gillian Sze, Stephanie Bolster, and Ronna Bloom

Join us to celebrate the launch of three new poetry collections: Gillian Sze's , Stephanie Bolster's , and Ronna Bloom's . Readings will be followed by a discussion, audience Q&A, and booksigning.

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“An Orange, A Syllable by Gillian Sze is one of the most beautiful and emotionally resonant works I've read in a long time.” — My Asian Era blog

An Orange, A Syllable details a period of maternal and artistic transformation. This prosimetrical work is a meditation on motherhood, language, and art. The central speaker witnesses the earliest utterances of her child and launches into a poetic inquiry of words themselves, asking, How to measure one’s mouth by its words? The speaker seeks an answer amidst the language that surrounds her — words misspoken, mispronounced, remembered, unwritten — and, in doing so, struggles with signification and significance.

Each prose poem in the five-part collection darts between the many meanings of “fit” — as in “a sudden burst of emotion” or “to be the right size and shape,” and the archaic “fytte” (a section of a poem). A text becomes an open mouth, a square day of a calendar, or a bare fragment of a narrative. The final section of the book is an intimate and ekphrastic engagement with the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Drawn to Hammershøi’s paintings of the empty rooms of his apartment, the speaker recognizes a familiar space of art’s insistence.

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books and picture books. Her book of poems and essays, Quiet Night Think, received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives in Montreal, QC, where she teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.

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"[Bolster's] poems work with a voice so at ease and natural that their insights seem at once familiar and new, the way summer rain announces itself just before it falls." — The Gazette (Montreal)

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.

Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, began as an exploration of Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl, and extended inward and outward from there. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French (Pierre Blanche). Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.

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"A marvel." — Souvankham Thammavongsa

The characters in Ronna Bloom’s new collection In a Riptide are tired, sick, old, fragile, baffled, worried, dying, dead, uncertain, snacking, happy, generous, preoccupied, horny, astonished, and sometimes free. Emily Dickinson and Bukowski show up in the same poem. The Buddha has a shower. And Sisyphus is released from his burdens. It’s the hospital meets the circus. Here, humour, darkness, and ecstasy mingle, and the chaos doesn’t stop. But there’s breath in these poems. There’s life.

Ronna Bloom is a Toronto-based poet and educator and the author of seven books of poetry. Her work has been broadcast on CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and translated into Bangla and Chinese. Ronna is also someone who puts poetry to work in the world; she has led many initiatives to bring poetry into health care settings, specifically developing the first Poet-in-Residence program at Mount Sinai Hospital/Sinai Health. Ronna’s most recent book is A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, September 2023).

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