Kayla Czaga, Jessi MacEachern and Alex Prong @ Westminster Bookmark

Name: Kayla Czaga, Jessi MacEachern and Alex Prong @ Westminster Bookmark
Start: 2025-04-28T19:00:00-03:00
Location: 88 York St, Fredericton, NB E3B 3N5, Canada

Schedule

Mon, 28 Apr, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-03:00

Location

88 York St, Fredericton, NB E3B 3N5, Canada | Fredericton, NB

Westminster Bookmark, the UNB Reading Series and Invisible Publishing are pleased to welcome visiting poets Kayla Czaga and Jessi MacEachern for a reading in the shop. Joining them will be UNB grad student Alex Prong.
The reading will take place here at Westminster Bookmark (88 York St.) on Monday, April 28th at 7pm. It is free to attend and books will be for sale.
KAYLA CZAGA is the author of two previous poetry collections-For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019). Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.
About MIDWAY: Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, Midway is an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. "I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch," writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents' deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London's Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak-both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.
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JESSI MACEACHERN, born in Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island, currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, where she teaches English literature. As a poet, professor, and scholar of contemporary feminist poetics, her critical and creative writing has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and around the world. Her debut poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks was published by Invisible Publishing in 2021.
About CUT SIDE DOWN: Cut Side Down is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books. The title is a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. The poems are collapsing under the weight of influence and the result is a sumptuous, body-and-mind bending landscape. The book is written in three parts, but those parts refuse to remain discrete. In poems that blur the line behind autobiographical lyric and conceptual experiment, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and their many husbands and wives attend the experimental salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman. Lorine Niedecker is in the interactive classroom, scolding Charles Olson. The poet is sometimes perceptible too, as a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, as a young woman in Montréal la retentissante, as an inventor of worlds and words. Ultimately, through being immersed in the reading life of the poet and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down is a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory.
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ALEX PRONG (she/they) is pursuing a PhD in Gender and Sexuality in Literature. They are interested in queer love, plotless novels, science fiction, comedic writing, and absurdism. When she is not reading or writing, Alex can be found trying not to fall while roller skating or trying not to fail while cooking.