Atwater Poetry Project – Holiday Book Fair Special Edition

Thursday, November 3, 2022, 7 pm
Atwater Library and Computer Centre, Adair Auditorium
(4023 Tupper Street, Westmount) Free, no registration required

Join us for a special edition of the Atwater Poetry Project series, in the Adair Auditorium of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre. This evening of new writing will feature poets Prathna Lor (Emanations), River Halen (Dream Rooms), and Trynne Delaney (the half-drowned), with readings moderated by APP curator, Faith Paré.

In-person event details: Space is limited; first come, first seated. In accordance with public health guidelines, mask wearing for in-person events is optional, though encouraged. The Atwater Library and Adair Auditorium are accessible by elevator. Be sure to use the entrance on 4023 Tupper Street, around the corner from Atwater Avenue. For elevator access, use the accessible entrance in the alley off Tupper.   

Live streaming details: The event will be live-streamed to our YouTube account, no prior registration is required. Tune in at 7 pm on November 3, 2022, to view and participate in the Q&A via the chat function. 

Explore other 2022 Holiday Book Fair events here, and discover more English-language books written, published, or translated in Quebec at ReadQuebec.ca.

…

River Halen is an award-winning, transgender writer of Catalan and Danish descent living in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their poems and essays dealing with relation, ecology, transformation, and sexuality have been published widely in Canada, as well as in the U.S., Australia, and in translation in Japan. Their first book, Match, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and their most recent book, Dream Rooms, a collection of essays and poems, includes works selected for Best Canadian Essays and was praised by the Bay Area Reporter as “unique and mesmerizing.” Visit their website, Facebook, or Instagram.

Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Set in the years that led up to author River Halen coming out as trans, this collection concerns itself with what sits on the surface of daily life, hidden in plain view, hungry for address—what it means to take a stranger’s pet rabbit to the vet in a year of accelerating extinctions, to lose your clothes to a moth infestation then buy a duvet made of fossil fuels, to learn your bookshelf is full of work written by rapists and rape apologists, to consider a birth control device as a narrative about bodies and their possibilities, then pull the string. Deeply queer and trans not only in its content but in its thinking, Dream Rooms invites readers to that place in consciousness where fear and desire, hidden information and common knowledge brush up against each other and are mutually transformed.

Trynne Delaney is a writer currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They hold a Master of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary. Their work appears in The Puritan, CV2, Carte Blanche, GUTS, WATCH YOUR HEAD, and the League of Canadian Poets’ chapbook These Lands: a collection of voices by Black Poets in Canada, edited by Chelene Knight. They grew up in the Maritimes. the half-drowned, a poetic novella, was published by Metatron Press in spring 2022. Visit their website, and Twitter.

the half-drowned is a vision of a future at the end of the world where what survives is the shapeshifting love of family both given and chosen. Drawing on the Afro-diasporic ancestral knowledge of water and the urgency of desire, Delaney builds a glittering, speculative world where community holds through grief, where we must choose to fend for ourselves while also caring for others. the half-drowned is a genre-bending novella that crafts a polyphony of voices to speak to and through our lives and dreams in order to reach for the unspoken and unsayable and make it heard. 

Prathna Lor is a poet, essayist, editor and educator, who has published in Canadian Literature, DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, Poetry is Dead and Plenitude Magazine, among others. Lor is Poetry Editor at Shrapnel Magazine and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. They live in Montreal, QC. Visit their website.

Emanations (Wolsak & Wynn 2022) is a meditation on the spirit of disaster, both personal and collective. Pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative, Prathna Lor charts the depths of the self, searching for an internal music. With a lyric style that emerges from the ruins of unwanted life, Prathna Lor has created a debut collection that is radiant to touch.

Thank you to our generous funders, partners, and sponsors!