Leah Horlick Virtual Launch with Peace Akintade
Monday Apr 19 2021 7:00 pm, Virtual, Zoom
Join poet Leah Horlick to celebrate her latest collection Moldovan Hotel (Brick Books) just in time for National Poetry Month. Leah will be joined by special guest reader Peace Akintade. The event will feature auto Zoom captions.
Registration is required to directly participate in the Zoom webinar. It will be simultaneously streamed on YouTube and available for viewing thereafter.
In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to
neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick’s poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. “No one ever thinks they might be the dragon,” Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.
Leah Horlick grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree territory and the homelands of the Métis in Saskatchewan. Her first collection of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) was shortlisted for both a ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. In 2016 she won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, Canada’s only award for LGBT emerging writers. That same year, her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. In 2018, her piece “You Are My Hiding Place” was named Poem of the Year by ARC Poetry Magazine and shortlisted for inclusion in the 44th Pushcart Prize by the Pushcart Board of Editors. She lives in Calgary.
Peace Akintade is an African Canadian Poet, Public Speaker, and Thespian residing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. 2021 Saskatchewan Youth Poet Laureate, Co-coordinator of Write Out Loud, a Saskatoon-based Youth Poetry Community, and board member of the Tonight it's Poetry Community. Part of the Youth Speaker’s Bureau for the Office of the Treaty Commissioner. An active member of the Truly Alive Youth and Family Foundation Inc [TAYFFI] as a Youth spokesperson. Her poems touch on the impact of slavery in her village, colorism, growing up in Kuwait, Nigeria, and Canada, and relearning her culture in the face of colonization.
See:
Moldovan Hotel
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Trade paperback
$20.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.00
Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.
In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women's lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick's poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. "No one ever thinks they might be the dragon," Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.
"If Leah Horlick's second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the 'names of the oppressors are blotted out'." -- Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days
"Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past--used to dehumanize and unmoor--and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection." -- Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
For Your Own Good
-
Trade paperback
$18.00
Reader Reward Price: $16.20
In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator's survival of a domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the magic that is at the heart of transformation and survival. These poems are acutely painful, rooted in singular and firsthand experiences. But Horlick also draws from a legacy of feminist, Jewish and lesbian writers against violence: epigraphs from the works of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt act as touchstones alongside references to contemporary writers, such as Daphne Gottlieb and Michelle Tea. In this reflection on grief, silence and community, we follow the narrator's own journey as she explores what it is to survive, to change, to desire and to hope. At once unflinching and fragile FOR YOUR OWN GOOD is a collection with transformation at its heart.