Book Launch: sometimes, forest

Name: Book Launch: sometimes, forest
Start: 2026-06-16T19:00:00-06:00
Location: 1302 4 St SW #100, Calgary, AB, Canada, Alberta T2R 0X8

Schedule

Tue, 16 Jun, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

1302 4 St SW #100, Calgary, AB, Canada, Alberta T2R 0X8 | Calgary, AB

Elee Kraljii Gardiner launches her new book of poetry, sometimes, forest, a "hylofeminist" work exploring how our bodies and those of the ecosystems around us are permeated and interwoven. Kraljii Gardiner is joined by a coterie of talented authors to help celebrate the literary arts, including Tolu Oloruntoba, Nikki Reimer, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Samantha Jones. Join us for this exciting and exuberant evening at Shelf Life Books, June 16, at 7 PM. ABOUT THE BOOK sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. But the coastal temperate rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. Returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.
Meanwhile, fires, heat domes, and landslides mirror hormonal heat and biological surges. Considering how networks of lateral support mitigate and challenge hierarchical, individualistic structures, sometimes, forest develops a theory of hylofeminism that attends to a deep, communal connection with nature as a relational way of being with the self and the more-than-human world. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of the poetry collections (Trauma Head, serpentine loop) and the editor of two essay collections (Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside). A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, sound and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational art installations that investigate cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. She directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive and is the seventh poet laureate of Vancouver, learning in community via the sound-based legacy project Here, Hearing. Her new book, sometimes, forest, is just out from Talonbooks. Ryan Fitzpatrick is the author of five books of poetry, including the recent No Depression in Heaven (Talonbooks, 2025) and Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023). Their first nonfiction book, Ace Theory: An Essay in Fragments About Asexuality, will be published by Book*Hug this fall.

Samantha Jones is a writer and earth scientist based in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary, Alberta). She is Black Canadian and white settler, with roots in Nova Scotia, Québec, and Ontario. Her poetry collection, Attic Rain (NeWest), won the 2025 Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry and was an Alberta Literary Awards finalist. She recently co-edited I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Roseway). Sam is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, researching poetic inquiry as a method to connect climate and weather to experiences of wellness.

Tolu Oloruntoba deploys and manages virtual health technologies for health authorities and organizations. He was a primary care physician in his first career. His third poetry collection, Unravel, was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. His other work has won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He lives in Calgary, Alberta. Nikki Reimer’s critical and creative work grapples with death, grief, illness, and late capitalism. Despite this, people seem to think they are pretty funny. Their fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We was long listed for both the Raymond Souster and the Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.