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Tanis MacDonald -- Book Launch

Thursday Dec 05 2019 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

Winnipeg launch of Mobile: Poems (Book*hug) featuring a conversation with special guest reader Catherine Hunter.

Mobile is an uncivil feminist reboot of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Other Poems; an urban lament about female citizenship and settler culpability; an homage to working and walking women in a love/hate relationship with Toronto, its rivers and creeks, its sidewalks and parks, its history, misogyny and violence. How do we, in Lee’s words, see the “lives we had not lived” that “invisibly stain” the city? What are the sexual politics of occupying space in a city, in a workspace, in history? How can we name our vulnerabilities and our disasters and still find strength?

Written in a slippery mix of lyric and experimental styles, Mobile is MacDonald’s grouchiest book yet.

Tanis MacDonald is the author of several books of poetry and essays, including Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. She is the co-editor of GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times and the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt. Her book, The Daughter’s Way, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian Literary Criticism. She is the winner of the Bliss Carman Prize (2003) and the Mayor’s Poetry City Prize for Waterloo (2012). She has taught at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and in 2017 won the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award from the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs. Originally from Winnipeg, she teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Poet and novelist Catherine Hunter has published four collections of poetry, Necessary CrimesLunar Wake, Latent Heat (which won the Manitoba Book of the Year Award) and St. Boniface Elegies (finalist for the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry); the novel After Light; three thrillers, Where Shadows BurnThe Dead of Midnight, and Queen of Diamonds; the novella In the First Early Days of My Death; and the spoken word CD Rush Hour. Two of her novels have been translated into German. Her essays, reviews, and poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including Essays on Canadian WritingThe Malahat ReviewWest Coast LinePrairie FireCV2The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland, and Best Canadian Poems 2013 and 2015. She edited Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and for ten years she was the editor of The Muses’ Company press. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.

See:

Mobile

- Tanis MacDonald

Trade paperback $18.00
Reader Reward Price: $16.20

Longlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Awards

Mobile is an uncivil feminist reboot of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies and Other Poems; an urban lament about female citizenship and settler culpability; an homage to working and walking women in a love/hate relationship with Toronto, its rivers and creeks, its sidewalks and parks, its history, misogyny and violence. How do we, in Lee's words, see the "lives we had not lived" that "invisibly stain" the city? What are the sexual politics of occupying space in a city, in a workspace, in history? How can we name our vulnerabilities and our disasters and still find strength?

Written in a slippery mix of lyric and experimental styles, Mobile is MacDonald's grouchiest book yet.

Praise for Tanis MacDonald:

"These poems performatively perturb our complacencies: toward city, land, plant, women, and men. With her sybil voice full of sass but never lacking civility, MacDonald forages the city for women's lives and names, knocking not on heaven's door but on the tombs where our world is heading. Confronting barriers of attitude and structure that women face daily, full of sounds and verve, Mobile is a deft counterpoint to Dennis Lee's long-ago Civil Elegies. Pick up this Mobile, readers; it?s ringing and it's no robocall!" --Erín Moure

"With delightfully subversive wordplay and intertextual sleight of hand, Tanis MacDonald wanders the text of the modern city, exploring its civil energies with intelligence, incision, compassion, music, ferocity and wit. A Sibyl's elegies for the civil legacies of the past, these feisty poems interrogate the mansplaining streets, finding the always-there voices and experiences of women in its architecture and shadows, curbs and enthusiasms, structures and strictures, its texts and traditions, violence and vibrance, twists and d�tournes. Go with MacDonald as she guides you through the streets of Mobile. It's a tour de force." --Gary Barwin

St. Boniface Elegies

- Catherine Hunter

Trade paperback $17.95
Reader Reward Price: $16.16

Winner of the 2020 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry

In four sections, St. Boniface Elegies traces a poet’s relationships with her family and her community through poems about travel, love, illness, work, and the writing life. In the first section, “Submission,” the Cape Cod poems describe a holiday taken in the midst of a period of grieving; the Irish poems delve into the poet’s relationship to her ancestors; and the Banff poems look at the irony of an injury to the writer’s hand while away at a writing retreat. “Oodena,” set at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, describes a magical place where birth, marriage, death and the imagination converge. “Winter Archive” questions the role of a poet in today’s urban environment and describes moving through time and a shifting cityscape of poverty, broken families, and broken promises, in the state of emergency that is Winnipeg. “The News” is a suite of poems about the impact of a devastating medical diagnosis on a marriage, the difficulties and small consolations of living day after day—as we all live—in a fragile, uncertain world. The final section, “The Reader,” includes a rhythmic Twitter-generated description of Canada’s “poetry wars”; a humorous but loving homage to Al Purdy; three glosas that respond to the writers Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and Rainer Maria Rilke.