Palimpsest Press Launch w/ André Narbonne, Adriana Oniță & Blair Trewatha

Those are Pearls (novel) by André Narbonne

From the seeds of an impoverished boilermaker’s adoration for a rich doctor’s daughter grows a sweeping story of a family whose personal passions are woven into the tapestry of world history. Harry Short first rides into bale at the beginning of the Boer War, in 1895, to win the heart of Margaret Roll. In 1914 he enlists again, to escape her. With Margaret, he sires a family that takes the reader through generations and across continents. They arrive in Canada as prairie homesteaders, witness the Winnipeg Riot of 1919, and survive the Great Flood of 1950 as well as marriage to bootleggers and communists, police investigation, unlikely heroism on the battlefield, and, all but one, a torpedo.

André Narbonne is a scholar, writer, and the publisher of Conspiracy Press, based in Windsor, Ontario. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, won the FreeFall Literary Contest, the David Adams Richards Prize, and the Atlantic Writing Contest. A first collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight, was shortlisted for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His first novel, Lucien & Olivia, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Descântec For My Split Tongue by Adriana Oniță

Descântec For My Split Tongue, Adriana Oniță’s first book of poetry, gathers English-Romanian poems that travel across generations, homelands, and dreamscapes to ask: what do we lose when we lose a language? Drawn from Oniță’s childhood and her immigration from Jilava to Edmonton, the poems explore dor—a Romanian word for deep longing—for her mother tongue. Along the way, Oniță unpacks “untranslatable” Romanian words and proverbs, each a compressed zip file of culture, humour, grief, and courage. The book itself becomes a descântec—part incantation, part prayer, part spell—summoning both the failures and the triumphs of translation into a ritual of healing.

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her multilingual poems appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com

Half Earth by Blair Trewartha

In his second full-length poetry collection, Half-Earth, Blair Trewartha explores what it means to survive in a world beset by climate crisis and the ever-distorting realities of digitised human life. Throughout, the poet weaves dreamlike narraves and excavates scenes of deep history that connect to both family and illness, all the while questioning how to raise young children through a pandemic and the advent of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than sermonizing or catastrophizing, Trewartha presents moments that exist on the brink of both the past and the future, replete with prehistoric tusks frozen in foreign tundra, a decaying family farmhouse, firestorms, the zeitgeist by algorithm, and a toddler’s visualisation of death. Half-Earth is a long-awaited beacon from one of Canada’s finest poets.

Blair Trewartha’s debut poetry collection , Easy Fix, (Palimpsest Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Relit Award. He also is the author of three chapbooks: Break In (Cactus Press, 2010),Porcupine Burning (Baseline Press, 2012), and human energy (Anstruther Press, 2022). His work has recently appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Prairie Fire Magazine, and The Fiddlehead. Born and raised in Huron County (Treaty 29 Territory), Blair now lives in London, Ontario (Treaty 6) with his partner and two children. Half-Earth is his second full-length collection of poetry.

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