A Celebratory Evening With Sylvia Legris (In Person)
Thursday Aug 15 2024 7:00 pm, Saskatoon, Travel Alcove
Join SYLVIA LEGRIS, recipient of the 2024/2025 PRAIRIE GRINDSTONE PRIZE, and special guest SHERI BENNING for a celebratory reading and discussion of Sylvia's poetry. followed by a Q&A (time permitting) and signing.
This event will be held in person in the Travel Alcove.
Sheri Benning’s fourth poetry collection, Field Requiem, was published in 2021 with Carcanet Press. Field Requiem was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Brick, and Poetry Review. Her previous collections of poetry include The Season’s Vagrant Light: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press), Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press). Benning is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Prairie Grindstone Prize is a $50,000 prize awarded yearly to a prairie writer, given in recognition of a body of work. Conceived, developed and funded by an anonymous donor committee, all of whom love Canadian literature and have a fondness for the talent of prairie writers, this annual prize was awarded in 2023 to an Alberta writer, in 2024 to a Saskatchewan writer, and will alternate between the two prairie provinces in the years ahead. The Prairie Grindstone Prize recognizes active writers with the hope that a year of freedom from financial constraints will be beneficial to their career.
See:
The Principle of Rapid Peering
- Sylvia Legris 
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$25.95
Reader Reward Price: $23.36
Self-seeding wind is a wind of ever-replenishing breath. --from "The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering" The title of Sylvia Legris' melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of "rapid peering." Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist's notebook in verse. Here is "where nature converges with words," as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic marking the seasons. Elements of weather, ornithology, entomology, and anatomy feed her condensed, inflective lines, making the heart bloom and the intellect dance.
Garden Physic
- Sylvia Legris
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Reader Reward Price: $23.36
Sylvia Legris's Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world's most cherished pastimes: Gardening! "At the center of the garden the heart," she writes, "Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff." As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris's poems map the garden as body and the body as garden--her words at home in the phytological and anatomical--like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky's "80 Flowers." In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation--spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.
Pneumatic Antiphonal
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Reader Reward Price: $15.26
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlets" series, Pneumatic Antiphonal is a fun, humming, bio-physiological word-whizzing flight into birdsong penned by young Canadian poet, Sylvia Legris -- her first publication in the U.S. An excerpt: The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise of red birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen. Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.
Nerve Squall
- Sylvia Legris
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Reader Reward Price: $15.26
Winner of the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize (Canadian Category).
Nerve Squall is a field guide like no other, a surreal handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge.
Legris’s fascination with weather, ghosts and brain disorders is the starting point for a collection of poetry that ensures you’ll never look at nature the same way again. You’ll find snow golems and ghost cats, and a sky filled with fish swimming the winds of a storm. And you’ll find a haunted terrain where the natural world becomes an allegory for our most intimate fears.
Despite their dark and often cinematic approach, these poems are also tinged with a sly, apocalyptic wit that can’t help but laugh as the sky falls.
Nerve Squall is a vital exploration of the symbiosis of storm, nerve and language, a sure-handed guide to the end of the world.
Circuitry of Veins
- Sylvia Legris
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Circuitry of Veins explores the relationship between women and their bodies, their families, and society. It traces one woman's disconnection--physical, emotional, spiritual ---and the ways in which she tries to locate herself.
The Hideous Hidden
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Reader Reward Price: $21.56
In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy. Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan's On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy's wonders: "Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen."
Iridium Seeds
- Sylvia Legris
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Poignant, sensitive and brilliantly composed, the poetry in iridium seeds is vocalized through complicated rhythms of abjection, tangible sound, and visual structures that are poems unto themselves.
