Victoria Triple Poetry Launch: Neil Surkan, Leesa Dean and Lisa Richter

Join us in beautiful Victoria, BC for the launch and celebration of three new collections of poetry: Neil Surkan's Empties, Leesa Dean's Interstitial, and Lisa Richter's Sublunary. The event will feature readings by the authors + special guest reader, Kayla Czaga, award-winning poet and author of Midway (House of Anansi, 2024).

Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 pm at Caffe Fantastico, 965 Kings Road, Victoria (doors at 6:00 pm).

Free to attend, all are welcome!

Books will be available for sale and signing by the authors.

This event is generously supported by the League of Canadian Poets.

About the books:

Empties by Neil Surkan (McGill-Queens University Press)

In a powerful interplay of striking descriptions with tender intimations, Empties, Neil Surkan’s third poetry collection, reckons with fatherhood in a depleted and collapsing environment: Is it possible to nurture new shoots while the fires close in? Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.

Interstitial by Leesa Dean (Gaspereau Press)

The poems in Interstitial probe the porous nature of existence, examining the ways in which the world, the body and the self are all liminal spaces. Writing in the interstitial time between the deaths of her parents, and using an array of forms and registers, author Leesa Dean turns a clear eye on the difficulties of family secrets, grief that is solitary and grief that is shared, lost languages, violence, recovery and resilience. These poems move from injury to reconciliation, demonstrating that we are strongest when we allow our shared narratives to weave us into a greater constellation than our individual lives afford.

Sublunary by Lisa Richter (University of Alberta Press)

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.

About the authors:

Neil Surkan is the author of three poetry collections, Empties, Unbecoming, and On High, as well as the chapbooks Die Workbook, Ruin, Their Queer Tenderness, and Super, Natural. He is the Poet Laureate of Nanaimo, BC.

Leesa Dean is an award-winning multi-genre writer, editor and educator living in rural B.C. on unceded Sinixt Territory in the Slocan Valley. Waiting for the Cyclone, her acclaimed short story collection about misbehaving women (Brindle & Glass) was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards. Her novella in verse, The Filling Station, was published in 2022 by Gaspereau Press, and she is the author of two poetry chapbooks. Her third book, Interstitial, includes poems that were shortlisted for the Diagram Chapbook Contest, the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, and she was runner-up for the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize in 2022.

Lisa Richter is a Toronto-based poet, writer, and educator. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Nautilus and Bone, whose honours include the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta’s Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry. Her work has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and will be serving as the next Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer-in-Residence at McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library. Her newest book, Sublunary, is now available from University of Alberta Press.

Kayla Czaga:

Kayla Czaga is the author of three poetry collections—For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019), and Midway (House of Anansi (2024). 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.

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