Poetry Launches
with Sanna Wani and Conyer Clayton
Hosted by Manahil Bandukwala
Special Presentation In Person Poetry Free
the lake-shaped excuse is brilliant and painful. Conyer Clayton takes us deep into grief’s interior, where a mother’s absence becomes a vital presence, carried not only in memory but in voice and body.
Manahil Bandukwala hosts launches for new collections by Sanna Wani and Conyer Clayton.
Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s Lantern explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood? Imbued with a quiet queerness, this book is a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief?all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness. Taking stock of one precious life, Lantern, invites us to consider our responsibilities?to ourselves and each other?and to choose who we might become.
Conyer Clayton’s third poetry collection, the lake-shaped excuse, is a book about grief and so, like most grief books, it is ultimately a book about love. The voices of a long-dead mother and a still-living daughter merge and twin and separate in a series of long poems that mirror yet fall apart from one another, much like the speakers' lives. In these poems the reader is guided through the window to the lake, into the body, away from the body, into remembering then unremembering. We see the toad in the firepit, the neighbour picking wildflowers in the front yard, their mother's hands, rubbing their eyes to sleep. the lake-shaped excuse is a conversation beyond endings, where laughter and silence reflect on the still surface of the water.
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
