Empties Book Launch

Join us for the book launch of Empties by Neil Surkan.

There will be books for sale, as well as readings by special guests Sophie Crocker, David Ly, Karina Irvine, & Adèle Barclay!

Neil Surkan is the Poet Laureate of Nanaimo, BC. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Empties, (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026), Unbecoming (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), and On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018). He has also published several chapbooks — Die Workbook (The Blasted Tree), Ruin (Knife|Fork|Book, 2023), Their Queer Tenderness (Knife|Fork|Book, 2020), and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017) — and his award-winning poems have appeared in numerous Canadian magazines. A Professor in the Department of English at Vancouver Island University, he lives in Nanaimo, on the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, with Luca, Edi, and Lloyd. Website: neilsurkan.com

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About the Book:

Yes it is both river and sea / yes they mingle together here / yes one empties for the other / yes it tastes like tears
In a powerful interplay of striking descriptions with tender intimations, Empties, Neil Surkan’s third poetry collection, reckons with fatherhood in a depleted and collapsing environment: Is it possible to nurture new shoots while the fires close in?
Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities – empty bottles, broken pots and cups – summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.
These are poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while still finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.” In direness, there is also awe: one mustn’t forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.

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