𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞 presents a 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐞𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 featuring 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐑𝐡𝐞𝐚 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐛𝐨𝐯, and 𝐒𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐡 𝐖𝐨𝐥𝐟𝐬𝐨𝐧.
Join us as 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 (𝑳𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝑬𝒙𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒆), 𝐑𝐡𝐞𝐚 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐛𝐨𝐯 (𝑻𝒂𝒍𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝑺𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓𝒔), and 𝐒𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐡 𝐖𝐨𝐥𝐟𝐬𝐨𝐧 (𝑨 𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒎𝒐𝒏 𝑵𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈) read from their respective works.
Admission is free.
𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒:
After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.
Talking to Strangers is a book of bracing encounters. Throughout her four decades as poet, Rhea Tregebov has displayed an uncommon eye for the mysteries of ordinary life—moments where, as she writes, “[t]he simplest things / elude me.” This gift is brought to brilliant effect in her eighth book of poetry and most charged to date. In gorgeous arias of recollection and evocation, of elegy and heartbreak, Tregebov mourns, praises, prays, regrets, summons, celebrates, and bears witness with formidable artistry and tenderness (“You wouldn’t think the inanimate would get tired /but it does.”) Direct, never forced, keenly observant, and marked by scrupulous craft, these new poems unfold in beguiling, often breathtaking ways. They confirm Tregebov’s place among the most significant poets of her generation. Talking to Strangers was awarded both the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and the 2025 Western Canada Jewish Book Award Betty Averbach Foundation Prize for Poetry. The book was also long-listed for the Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize.
The poems in A Common Name for Everything build idiosyncratic worlds around the themes of nature, home, parenting, and naming—worlds that are at once poignant and absurd: a professional namer of lakes explains his standards; the rural gods are given names; a study of sheep results in loneliness. Steeped in sound play and borrowing academic language to create a specimen lens, these poems bask in the local as they seek to name even the commonest earthly things.
𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐒:
Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Award. Her work has been translated into French (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d’Alice, Les Éditions du Noroît, 2007), Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. She edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope), the inaugural volume in that ongoing series; and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000.
Rhea Tregebov is the author of poetry, fiction and children’s picture books. Her eighth collection of poetry, Talking to Strangers, which was released by Véhicule Press in April, 2024, won the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry as well as the 2025 Western Canada Jewish Book Award for poetry. The book was also long-listed for the Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. Her poems have also earned the Pat Lowther Award, Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award. Tregebov’s 2019 novel, Rue des Rosiers, was short-listed for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Knife Sharpener’s Bell (2009), a Globe and Mail Jim Bartley Top 5 book, won the J.I. Segal Award and was shortlisted for the Kobzar Award. She has also published five popular children’s picture books, among them the Sasha series, illustrated by Hélène Desputeaux, creator of the Caillou television series. Tregebov has edited numerous anthologies, including Arguing with the Storm, an anthology of stories by women writers which she co-translated from the Yiddish. Tregebov was born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, where she received her undergraduate education at the University of Manitoba. She did graduate work in literature at Cornell and Boston Universities, receiving her MA in English & American literature from BU. After working in Toronto for many years as a freelance author and editor, she moved to Vancouver in 2004 to take up a position in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, where she taught workshops in poetry, translation, children’s literature and fiction. In June 2017, she retired from teaching at UBC; she now holds the position of Associate Professor Emerita. From 2021 to2023 she was Chair of The Writers Union of Canada.
Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything (Green Writers Press, 2019), which was awarded the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, PRISM International, Prairie Fire, and Grain. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment (2020) and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal (2023). Her poetry has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches poetry and creative writing at McGill University.
You may also like the following events from Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore:
Also check out other
Arts events in Montreal,
Literary Art events in Montreal,
Workshops in Montreal.
