Poetry Cabaret
with Tareyn Johnson, Kaie Kellough and Jordan Abel
Hosted by Jennifer Baker
In Person Streaming Poetry
“Jordan Abel’s Dad Era further advances his long-standing experiment with form and Indigenous narrative. The book teaches us how to read polyphonically, how to read multiple narrative threads at once. Dad Era is indeed about fatherhood but it also about aesthetic complexity and formal restlessness in life and art. It is moving and funny and, like all of his work, deeply considered.”
Join us for an evening of acclaimed poetry and a conversation hosted by poet and professor Jennifer Baker.
As a First Nations woman, Tareyn Johnson grew up without knowing the language of her ancestors. Her grandparents attended residential school, and neither they, nor her mother, carried the language. Left with a deep longing to embrace Anishnaabemowin (Ojibwe) language, she began her learning journey as an adult. Her new collection, Dawaa: The Space Between, consists of 26 poems—two for each of the Thirteen Moons—that juxtapose Ojibwe and English to express Johnson’s feeling of existing as an Anishnaabekwe in the modern world.
Interposition, the latest publication from poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, Kaie Kellough, is a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd. It borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis.
Dad Era, by Governor General’s Literary Award Winner, Jordan Abel, explores his role as a father to his daughter, Phoenix, and his relationship to popular and often toxic constructions of “fatherhood” on the internet. An irreverent, laugh-out-loud pastiche of free verse, hallmark card, bad truism, picture book, advice website, and meditative reflection on fatherhood. Breaking apart the idiomatic registers that define parenting today using distortion, contrast, sequencing, and palimpsest, all qualities that have come to define his oeuvre, Abel explores what it means to live, laugh, and yes, father “in a world without dads.”
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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