Join Sadiqa De Meijer, Melissa Powless Day & Stephanie Bolster at Another Story Bookshop to launch their phenomenal new books!
There’s the gorgeous poetry release from Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Award winner, Stephanie Bolster, Long Exposure, Anishinaabe and Kanien’kehá:ka poet Melissa Powless Day’s stunning A Bow Forged from Ash, and the gorgeous forthcoming collection of personal essays from Governor General’s Award winning author Sadiqa de Meijer, In The Field.
About Long Exposure:
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.
About Stephanie Bolster:
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.
About A Bow Forged from Ash:
Traversing lived experience, ancestral memory, family stories, and critical engagements with the Land, Powless Day pulls back the bow of language: her poems are poised, unyielding in their nanda-gikendang, their seeking, to voice complex stories about the messiness of returning home, a restoration of familial and community bonds generations in the making. Ultimately, A Bow Forged from Ash is a book that proves reclamation and resistance are inseparable: one cannot walk with pride in their Indigeneity without choosing to resist the colonial status quo.
This is a journey of Indigenous reclamation. In poems that explore identity, belonging, responsibility and wholeness, Melissa Powless Day navigates her ties to the landscapes of Southwestern Ontario and the nations to which she belongs.
About Melissa Powless Day:
Melissa Powless Day is Anishinaabe and Kanien’kehá:ka from Bkejwanong Territory (Walpole Island First Nation), with family ties in Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Her poetry has appeared in the Temz Review, TNQ, the Windsor Review, Luna Station Quarterly and Yellow Medicine Review, and her first chapbook, Secondhand Moccasins, was published in 2023 by Anstruther Press and shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Melissa is also a scholar and educator who is currently pursuing a PhD in Indigenous Education at Western University. She serves as the chair for Western’s Indigenous Writers’ Circle and as a Visiting Cultural Teacher for the London District Catholic School Board.
About In the Field:
In In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer’s follow up to the Governor General’s Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.
About Sadiqa de Meijer:
Sadiqa de Meijer is the author of the poetry collections Leaving Howe Island and The Outer Wards. Alfabet/alphabet won the 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her work has also won the CBC Poetry Prize and Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario.
http://www.sadiqademeijer.com/
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