Two new poetry collections out now!
Happy pub day to Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright and The Animal in the Room by Meghan Kemp-Gee!
Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright
Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care.Written before and immediately after the birth of her first child, these poems try to imagine the future her son will inherit. Encounters with an unusual cast of characters – including lonely cryptids, unrepentant grifters, and persistent ghosts – provide incomplete answers, and while the continuity errors keep multiplying around her, Wright pauses to consider whether our devotion to innovation is keeping us stuck.
The Animal in the Room by Meghan Kemp-Gee
Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body — really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures.
Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright
"Catriona Wright's Continuity Errors is a book of snaking moves and sneaking intellect, a book of style and fortitude and sass. Wright's always sharp and often eerie interrogations lead us through a world of cryptocurrency, grunt work, predictive policing, extinction, haute cuisine, billboard ads, smoke breaks, breast pumps; these are poems for our moment of onslaught and bewilderment that, having had the world forced down their throats, spit back."
– Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing
"These feminist poems include the serious and the absurd and interrogate our collective obsession with productivity and work instead of with care. Wright’s lyric, prose, and persona poems are all located within the domestic sphere of childbirth and child care, using different voices to explore these issues."
– Cassandra Drudi, Quill & Quire
CBC's Canadian poetry collections to watch for in spring 2023!
The Animal in the Room by Meghan Kemp-Gee
"Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan Kemp-Gee! Her poetry is curious, restless, uneasy, and imaginative; it is also highly disciplined, unfolds in precisely measured lines. Watch for brilliant uses of repetition — the slipperiness of meaning, its ever-doubling character, is on full display, played out in deft linguistic twists. A deadpan delivery amplifies the oddity of what’s encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the 'one painful spot of blue' in a deer’s eye. I can’t say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don’t miss it."
– Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems
"Kemp-Gee is a gifted satirist, whose wandering and wondering eye makes The Animal in the Room a fully unique book."
– Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
Read this interview with Meghan Kemp-Gee and Rob McLennan
May 25 at 6:30 pm
Catriona Wright at Perfect Books in Ottawa
Tuesday June 6 at 7:00 pm
Catriona Wright and Aaron Tucker at The City & The City Books in Hamilton
Wednesday June 7 at 7:00 pm
Catriona Wright at Words Worth Books in Waterloo
Sunday June 25 at 3:00 pm
Catriona Wright and Meghan Kemp-Gee at Massy Books in Vancouver
Thursday July 27 at 7:00 pm
Aaron Tucker and Catriona Wright at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly in Montréal
