Ottawa Book Launch for No One Knows Us There and Familiar Hungers

Name: Ottawa Book Launch for No One Knows Us There and Familiar Hungers
Start: 2025-05-20T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-05-20T20:30:00-04:00
Location: Perfect Books Ottawa

Schedule

Tue May 20 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Perfect Books Ottawa | Ottawa, ON

Perfect Books presents the Ottawa launch of Familial Hungers by Christine Wu (Brick Books) and No One Knows Us There by Jessica Bebenek (Book*hug Press). With special guest Ellen Chang-Richardson, author of Blood Belies.
Books will be available for purchase, and of course the authors will be signing!
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
7:00 - 8:30 pm ET
Perfect Books, 258 Elgin Street, Ottawa, ON
Admission is free. All are welcome to attend.
Synopsis for Familiar Hungers:
Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs – the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
Praise for Familiar Hungers:
“In Familial Hungers, Christine Wu ushers her readers into a world where time expands like cooked grains of rice, love is a bowl of cut fruit, and the dead still eat. Emotionally grounded and precise, Wu’s poetry captures the elusive quality of the immigrant home – a place where tongues stutter and tastebuds recall – and shows us just how desire can linger in a full stomach. Familial Hungers is a full-bodied and deeply satisfying debut.” — Gillian Sze, author of Quiet Night Think
Synopsis for No One Knows Us There:
In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.
Praise for No One Knows Us There:
“Death and its horror, whether we ignore it or not, await us all. Jessica Bebenek’s brilliant poems are a burning light just ahead of us, and we follow each page with a new sense of breathing. I love this book; it gave me a beautiful living frame for the great vanishing trick of life, and I want to buy a copy for everyone I love!” —CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
Bios:
CHRISTINE WU is a Chinese-Canadian poet who was born and raised on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver, BC). She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a MLIS from Dalhousie University, and a MA in English from the University of New Brunswick. In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and in 2022, she was shortlisted for the RBC Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She now lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) in Mi’kma’ki.
JESSICA BEBENEK is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She works as a risograph printer and bookmaker at Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. In 2021, Bebenek was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism. No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry.
ELLEN CHANG-RICHARDSON is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent. The author of Blood Belies [Wolsak & Wynn, 2024] and author/co-author of six poetry chapbooks, their multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, Room, the Ex-Puritan, the Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head, Vallum Contemporary, and more. A third culture kid at heart, Ellen's writing is informed by their love of contemporary art, their concern with the human impact on the earth, and their experience moving through the world as they are. Co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, an editor for Room and long con magazine, and a member of the poetry collective VII, Ellen is currently based on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg.* You can usually find them baking sourdough bread from their starter, Bubbles, or biking the riverside trails on their single-speed. They are a full member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers' Union of Canada.