Brick Books poets Manahil Bandukwala and David Bradford and editors River Halen and Sonnet L’Abbé will read from their most recent books and discuss their work in terms of personal and public histories, writing over (and under) dominant narratives.

Hosted by Brick Books publisher Alayna Munce.

WHEN: Friday, March 10 at 3:30 PM

WHERE: The Lab at Ada's

About Brick Books:
As one of the few poetry-only publishers in the world and a long-venerated member of Canada’s publishing industry, Brick Books is a hub and a home for poets and lovers of poetry. Our guiding goal is to listen to and amplify urgent voices in poetry, and to do so with kindness and rigour. We aim to stand for and lavish attention upon unquantifiable things, and to make way for perspectives that have been marginalized; we believe in poetry as a space to speak publicly what can’t be said or heard elsewhere. Our mission is to hold space for poetry in Canada and the world (or, in other words, to champion a hard-to-commodify art form in a capitalist culture!) and to do it with an almost obsessive level of care. Through the curation of poetry with deep craft and something at stake, Brick Books aspires to bring moving and relevant books into the world, to honour poetry as an intangible-but-essential act of attention and crucial mode of speech.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS / EDITORS

MANAHIL BANDUKWALA is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her project Reth aur Reghistan is a multidisciplinary exploration of folklore from Pakistan interpreted through poetry and sculpture. She holds an MA in English from the University of Waterloo. MONUMENT is her first book. Her second collection, Before Clarity, will be published by Brick Books in the fall of 2024.

DAVID BRADFORD is a poet, translator and curator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal). His first book, Dream of No One but Myself, won the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His second book, Bottom Rail on Top, will be published by Brick Books in 2023, as will House Within a House, Bradford's translation of Nicholas Dawson’s award-winning Désormais, ma demeure.

RIVER HALEN is an award-winning 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, was selected by Renee Gladman for Artforum Magazine as a top-ten pick of the year. River is an acquiring editor at Brick Books and teaches sessionally in the Toronto Metropolitan University Publishing Program.

DR. SONNET L'ABBÉ is a mixed-race Black writer, professor, organizer and emerging musician of Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, and Québecois ancestry, and the author of three collections of poetry: A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet’s Shakespeare. Sonnet’s Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of The Year for 2019, was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, and longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bp Nichol Chapbook Award, and their early poems won what is now the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. L’Abbé is on the editorial board of Brick Books, and also sits on the poetry editorial board of The Malahat Review. L’Abbé lives on Vancouver Island, where they are currently a professor of Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University.

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