Launch of Lisa Richter's SUBLUNARY (featuring guest readers)

Featuring special guest readers Hoa Nguyen and Cassidy McFadzean, hosted by Jim Johnstone. Masking is not required but encouraged.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Sublunary, Lisa Richter explores what it’s like to live “under the moon” in a world that is simultaneously a heartbreak and a total wonder. Sweetmeats and ocelots rain from the sky. Pets are shadow puppets. A kitten impersonates a teacup. A grieving daughter travels back in time to be at her father’s side in the final hours of his life. Newlyweds soar over the rooftops of west-end Toronto, passing a violin-playing goat along the way. From Atlantis to Mount Olympus to Christie Pits, these poems interweave moments of absurdity and awe, creating a nuanced portrait of what “a reckless intimacy with the world” might look like—for better or worse. Sublunary is a book of elegy, play, and rupture that advocates for an ethics of care, solidarity, and compassion for our perfectly imperfect selves and each other: a mode of survival that is full-throated and, at times, even joyous.

“These poems are moving sublunary folk tales, a contemporary oral tradition of grief and wonder, surprise and bemused celebration. They have the steady and certain strength of craft and curiosity. Life as we experience it is beautiful and strange, a painful and tender paradox. These are poems that see. We are seen. —Gary Barwin, author of The Comedian’s Book of the Dead

LISA RICHTER

Lisa Richter is a poet, writer, and educator from Tkaronto/Toronto. She is the author of two books of poetry, Closer to Where We Began and the Nautilus and Bone, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and the National Jewish Book Award, among other honours. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and currently serves as the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild’s Winter 2026 Virtual Writer-in-Residence.

CASSIDY MCFADZEAN

Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024). Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2025). Cassidy is a spring resident at the McCormack Writing Center in Portland, Oregon and is the 2025-2026 Poet-in-Residence at Arc Poetry Magazine.

HOA NGUYEN

Hoa Nguyen is a poet and professor of creative writing and poetics at Toronto Metropolitan University and the author of six acclaimed poetry collections, including the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her most recent book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was a finalist for a National Book Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and winner of the Canada Book Award. Hoa is an integral member of She Who Has No Master(s), a project of collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora.

JIM JOHNSTONE is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The King of Terrors (Coach House Books, 2023). His poetry has appeared internationally in magazines like POETRY, Poetry London, PN Review, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Northwest, and he has won several national awards including the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and the Robin Blaser Award.

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