We are excited to be hosting three poets in our store on Tuesday, June 3rd at 7 pm including one of our own - a Bookmartian from Westminster Bookmark in Fredericton. We hope you can join us for a wonderful evening of poetry featuring Cory Lavender, Jessica Hiemstra, and Nick Thran.
The larger-than-life characters and stories that tumble out of Cory Lavender’s Come One Thing Another assert the experiences of generations of Lavenders and Roys as a kind of rural epic, transposing ordinary occurrences into the ageless framework of myth and its preoccupation with metamorphosis– with shifting identities and values and the persistent transformations of people and places. Colloquial, humourous, exuberant, shot through with reverie, these poems are carefully crafted oratory, love songs for a vibrant heritage.
Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death. One moment tender, the next moment dark, hard, and raw, Blood Root blends diary entries, drawings, and lyricism to hold up a polished mirror to colonialism and its echoing impact. Considering beauty and horror in equal reverence “so I’m not human once removed,” Hiemstra cuts through pretence, bearing witness to humans as they confront and connect to one another and the larger world.
The poems in Nick Thran’s Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The long poem “The Minim” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.
CORY LAVENDER is a poet of African Nova Scotian and European descent living in Mi’kma’ki. His work has appeared in journals such as Grain, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and The Fiddlehead, and in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020).
JESSICA HIEMSTRA is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy. In 2018, Hiemstra won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario/ Niigaani-gichigami. Some of these drawings appear in Blood Root.
NICK THRAN’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Thran lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller at Westminster Bookmark. You might recognize some of his wit and wisdom in our newsletter BookmarkThis!
You may also like the following events from Bookmark:
Also check out other
Arts events in Charlottetown,
Literary Art events in Charlottetown,
Music events in Charlottetown.
