House of Anansi Poetry Bash
with Brandi Bird, A.F. Moritz and Graeme Bezanson
In Person Poetry Free
“Pitiful, in strong and beautiful verse, answers back to the biomedical failure to recognize the human inside of the hospital gown.”
Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation celebrating new titles from House of Anansi Press.
Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection, Pitiful, detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons.
A.F. Moritz’s twenty-third book of poems originated with an impulse, beginning in April 2019, to write a series of continuous poems. The first goal was to keep them short. The second was to make them separate, in the process reflecting the whole of human life, stable in moments and bodies. In The Wren, Moritz arranges 70 short poems in a sort of galaxy: an apparent scatter, not of stars but of poems, of feeling-thoughts.
Graeme Bezanson’s debut collection, Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity. These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence.
Special thanks to our friends at the Great Canadian Theatre Company.
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
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