Chapbook Launch Show: "The All-New Filaments" by Elaine Marilyse

Come and celebrate the launch of the third chapbook from Ottawa poet and menace Elaine Marilyse at Happy Goat Coffee (Laurel) on Saturday, May 4th! The All-New Filaments is made up of fifteen new poems written from 2020-2023, none of which have been performed live yet. All fifteen poems will be making their stage debut, as will several signature cocktails, a few special guests, a carefully-crafted playlist, and an audio-visual presentation.
**Stay tuned for livestream details (coming soon) if you can't make it in person!
ABOUT THE BOOK:

The All-New Filaments is a new collection of poems that wrestle with shifting goalposts and frames of reference, as well as such critical questions as, “Who gets to decide what counts as canon?”, “What’s the big deal about gold?”, “Is anything really a coincidence?”, “How much is too much compromise to get along with other people?” and “Why does Michelangelo’s David have such colossal yaoi hands?”

Densely woven and dizzyingly iterative, these poems see you waiting on the sidewalk and holler at you to get on the bus already. This is intertextuality for people who couldn’t afford to buy the textbook and have been kind of winging it all semester, as well as for people who have the thing memorized and are secretly dying to prove it. It is an analog Wikipedia rabbit-hole. It is not recommended for readers who do not regularly have more than four open browser tabs at a time.

Named after the All-New Restaurant (Est. 2014) in Cornwall, Ontario, this book is about serendipity, memes, pandemic breakups, inescapable patterns, small amphibians, playing all the hits, the power of friendship (positive), the power of friendship (derogatory), and the constant small repairs we have to do to keep running on the electricity of being alive and being loved.
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'Like a person who tried LSD once and declared that we should spike the drinks of every world leader (“It would literally solve all of our problems”), I go around recommending this collection to absolutely anyone; the difference is, I have taken the trip now multiple times, and I have yet to be disenchanted by its power. Elaine Marilyse’s poetry is punk for an increasingly complex and demanding world, one in which rage has become as blunt a tool for survival as grinning and bearing it did before. This is a collection about the struggle to be recognized as an individual, but it is also about the realization that our bone-deep longing for community is indicative of the absolute necessity of other people.

The combination of the specific with the universal has always been a tool for both poetry and comedy, and Marilyse uses it, seemingly effortlessly, for both. If Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Elaine Marilyse’s answer is that living itself is a form of storytelling, with the heroes, villains, themes and meaning constantly shifting.'

— Em Kwissa, author and editor

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"Fabulous book. Love the mentions of me."

— Browen Matheson, bookseller and accidental muse

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ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Elaine Marilyse cut her teeth in live competitions, and admittedly sometimes forgets that not everything is one. Born and raised in Carleton Place, Ontario, Marilyse was the 2013 Slam Champion for the Lanark County Live Poets' Society (LiPS)—the first and only rural slam poetry scene to compete on the national stage—and competed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Montreal the same year. She is a member of Beausoleil First Nation on the Georgian Bay, ngig doodem, and she lives in Ottawa. The All-New Filaments is her third chapbook, preceded by Unraveling (2019) and Fingernail Moon (2016). This is the first one without any pictures.
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COVID SAFETY: There WILL be guests with compromised immune systems present, so please respect their needs as well as your own! In the spirit of harm reduction, this is a masked event. Food and drinks will be available, so we ask that you keep a mask on except when eating or drinking. The venue has a large garage door to provide ventilation, but depending on weather and construction outside, they may not be able to keep it open. If it has to be closed, a small HEPA filter will be running. This isn't a perfect system, but please come at this from a place of "whatever I can do to help is better than nothing," rather than "it's impossible to be perfectly safe, so I'm not gonna bother at all."
**If you have any ambiguous symptoms whatsoever, TEST. If you're sick, DO NOT COME IN PERSON. The event will be livestreamed, so you're welcome to attend virtually!
ACCESSIBILITY: The venue (Happy Goat Laurel) has a wheelchair-accessible entrance and a wheelchair-accessible washroom. The entrance is wide enough for most mobility aids, and there are no stairs to navigate. The cafe has seating for 30, and available seating will be prioritized for those who need it, so please ask staff if you need a seat and can't immediately find one. There won't be any strobing lights. If you have more specific needs or access concerns not addressed here please email [email protected]!

Host or Publisher Elaine Marilyse