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Kerry Ryan Hybrid Book Launch

Friday Apr 21 2023 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium, Streaming via YouTube
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

Join Kerry Ryan for the launch of her new poetry collection Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children (Frontenac House). Featuring a reading and a conversation hosted by Ariel Gordon, followed by a book signing.

The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream featuring live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children is a striking third collection by one of Canada’s most essential poets. Kerry Ryan stares without flinching at everything in her path: family, grief, dog obituaries, fine-toothed lice combs, quotidian gore, a water slide that is “not a slide, it’s a throat closing in,” and herself as mother. The collection is replete with self-doubt and thorny humour, as when the speaker struggles to suckle a wolf pup while admiring the softness of her daughter’s cheek. The poet, while staying close to home, sees herself (and us) in birds blown thousands of kilometres off course, and in reindeer defending their young. Ryan’s vision of motherhood and midlife is fierce, edgy, and tender.

Kerry Ryan has previously published two books of poetry, The Sleeping Life (The Muses’ Company) and Vs. (Anvil), which was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the CBC poetry prize. She lives and writes in Winnipeg.

Host Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. Her fifth book, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate change across the prairies, written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt, will be published by At Bay Press in fall 2023. Gordon’s work has appeared recently in Canadian Notes and QueriesCanthiusperiodicities, and The Quarantine Review and is forthcoming in FreeFall and Grain, as 2nd place winner of the Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest.

See:

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children

- Kerry Ryan

Trade paperback $19.95
Reader Reward Price: $17.96

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children is a striking third collection by one of Canada’s most essential poets. Kerry Ryan stares without flinching at everything in her path: family, grief, dog obituaries, fine-toothed lice combs, quotidian gore, a water slide that is “not a slide, it’s a throat closing in,” and herself as mother. The collection is replete with self-doubt and thorny humour, as when the speaker struggles to suckle a wolf pup while admiring the softness of her daughter’s cheek. The poet, while staying close to home, sees herself (and us) in birds blown thousands of kilometres off course, and in reindeer defending their young. Ryan’s vision of motherhood and midlife is fierce, edgy, and tender.