Whatever state we are

On Thursday, November 7th at 6 pm, Join Massy Arts and poets Jami Macarty, Johanna Skibsrud, and Valerie Witte for a reading celebrating their recently released poetry collections. A book signing will follow the reading. Authors books available for purchase at event.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.

Registration is free or by donation and required for entry.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the Authors:

Jami Macarty: Jami Macarty teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University, writes essays, reviews, and poetry, and is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series, The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award - Poetry Arizona, and four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more, visit: www.jamimacarty.com

Johanna Skibsrud: Johanna Skibsrud's Medium shares the lives and perspectives of women who—in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums—have helped to shape the course of history such as Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie. Medium interprets the voices of women vilified over time, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman’s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other.

Valerie Witte: Valerie Witte is the author of A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie Press, 2023); One Thing Follows Another (punctum books, forthcoming) and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019), both in collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal; and a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015). Her latest chapbook is Listening Through the Body (above/ground, 2021), and her work has appeared in publications such as VOLT, Diagram, Interim, and The Hunger. She has attended residencies through The Hambidge Center, Ragdale Foundation, and La Porte Peinte Center for the Arts and is currently a member of Airlie Press. More at valeriewitte.com.

About the Books: (all will be available for purchase at the event)

In Jami Macarty's The Whole Catastrophe, offers critic Rosie Long Decter, "every asterisk indicates something precious. Macarty uses the poetic form to create space for what is otherwise omitted: the fresh air outside car windows, the stars blotted out by city infrastructures, a friend gone too soon. Chronicling a road trip to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, Macarty reflects on fragility, greed and the disasters we must withstand, from toxic feedlots to carbon monoxide poisoning. “We are never very far from an explosion,” she writes, but this is no reason to disengage. Rather, The Whole Catastrophe is a testament to the necessary entanglement of all things. “They can’t out-reverence us,” Macarty writes. Here, resisting destruction means holding onto a sense of wonder, annotating cows in their fields, waving hello to grief, knowing catastrophe like a constellation above."

Johanna Skibsrud's Medium shares the lives and perspectives of women who—in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums—have helped to shape the course of history such as Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie. Medium interprets the voices of women vilified over time, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman’s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other.

Polyphony of silk and skin, Valerie Witte's A Rupture in the Interiors is a rapturous exploration of im/perfection, threading innovative form and histories of value—of the female body, especially, and of material worth—with dream logic and associative mastery. This is a modern tapestry of everyday traumas that, while seemingly minor, mark us all as participants in the human experience. Woven together, these images of disorder and defect tell a story of the superficial damage that runs deep, and that cannot slip from us unseen or unfelt.

Host or Publisher Massy Arts Society