Triple Book Launch: Bruce Taylor, Sadiqa de Meijer & Richard Greene

Véhicule Press and The Word invite you to the launch of We Drove All Day for This: New and Selected Poems by Bruce Taylor, Qaf's People by Sadiqa de Meijer and Cannibal Rats by Richard Greene. We hope you'll join us for an evening of readings and discussion. Books will be for sale and refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to all.
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Bruce Taylor’s We Drove All Day for This moves between the microscopic and the domestic, finding poetry in mould gardens, marbles, guitars rebuilt in memory, and waterfalls collapsing on themselves. Science threads through the work — echocardiograms, pondwater “little animals,” the odd fact that humans are deuterostomes — alongside childhood recollections of winters, fireworks, and television. Marked by a rare combination of technical precision and emotional clarity, Taylor’s poetry is attentive to rhyme, sound, and image. Each poem is built to last—the product of someone who trusts that restraint and proportion matter as much as flourish. Taylor’s diction is plainspoken, even conversational, but within that modest frame he creates effects of startling intimacy and power. Bringing together new poetry and a generous selection of Taylor’s past work, We Drove all Day for This remind us that technique, patiently applied, can make even the smallest details feel inexhaustible.
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“If there is a mother country and a father country / if an ocean, or some seas, or river after river after river / breathe between your right side and your left / you’re from Qaf,” offers Governor General Award-winning writer Sadiqa de Meijer in, Qaf’s People, an elegant and ambitious exploration of mixed-race identity, diaspora, and the precarities of belonging, set in an imagined landscape drawn from Islamic mythology. Here, “a seedling body wearing a smock or backwards old // dress shirt makes a map.” Here, the Netherlands, Kenya, and Canada overlap, and “we love where we are from without a flag.” Within de Meijer’s skillful poems, history’s many tributaries converge, their confluence offering new ways of understanding the complexities of lives lived across and through continents, languages, and cultures. Qaf’s People is a book rich with inquisitive beauty and interrogative poise.
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Governor General’s Award-winner Richard Greene’s remarkable new collection, Cannibal Rats, is rich with searing wisdom, complicated grace, and magisterial craft. Reporting from locales as disparate as the Civil War battlefields of America and the storm-worn shores of Newfoundland, “where, as almost nowhere else, you can hold / in hand the inner substance of the world,” Greene bears witness to historical injustices, meditates on how “art and memory unravel” under the auspices of mortality, and wrestles with the loss of a beloved mother. “[T]here’s a limit to what the heart can learn / without pause and repair,” he writes in the stunning travelogue that ends the book, “but I should return / to this place of bayonets and canon, / small gesture of one still living to what is gone.” Cannibal Rats is a major accomplishment from one of Canada’s most accomplished poets.