ABOUT THE BOOKS
ADVENTURIZE YOUR SUMMER!
Award-winning poet Chris Pannell’s latest collection, Adventurize Your Summer!, is a wide-ranging look at travel, art and life. The author writes poems about the “Eastern Migrating Tourist,” and the indifference of the waters of the Nile, with many stops in between. Pannell gives equal time to great paintings and to the retired cab driver on dialysis; he is as adept writing about the Beach Boys as describing the cafés of Lisbon. Hopscotching through time and space, the poems in Adventurize Your Summer! are a study in humanity, filled with keen observation, touched with both sorrow and the wry observation that life is never what is promised in the marketing copy.
DEEPFAKE SERENDE
In Deepfake Serenade, Chris Banks’s sixth poetry collection, irreverent charm, emotional distance and surprising hot takes leap off every page. He writes in the title poem, “Inside every one of us is a deepfake. A holy ghost,” suggesting people have a choice to feel either like sad imposters or, if they're brave, like survivors staring down a world both utterly familiar and strange. These poems, sometimes narrative, sometimes surreal, oscillate between these two extremes as they confront middle age, new love, renewed optimism and memories, all with Banks’s signature wit and inventiveness. This collection is for anyone who has ever wished to wear “a halo of knowing,” or to be “the sparks flying” when outer phenomena and inner impulses collide. “Earn your rewards,” Banks writes in one poem, and we do, with every turn of the page.
SAVING
Why do we fall ill? How do we get better?
When his two-year-old son develops epilepsy, Shane Neilson and his wife, Janet, struggle to obtain timely care for him while at the same time navigating their young daughter’s diagnosis of childhood depression. His family’s journey through a sometimes inadequate and often uncaring medical system is informed by Shane’s personal history of bipolar disorder and his professional experience with disability as a practicing physician. With poetic language and imagery, Shane illustrates his personal experience of “madness” and describes his struggles with bipolar disorder from the point of view of both patient and practitioner.
In this poignant memoir about fatherhood, illness, and family, Shane Neilson shows that it is possible to not only escape the wreckage of the past, but to celebrate living with a disability in the present.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CHRIS PANNELL’s A Nervous City (2013) won the Kerry Schooley Book Award from the Hamilton Arts Council. In 2010, his book Drive (2009) won the Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry and the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry. From 1993 to 2005 he ran the new writing workshop and published two anthologies of work by that group. He is a former board member of the gritLIT Literary Festival and a former DARTS bus driver. He hosts and helps organize the monthly Hamilton reading series Lit Live. His latest book of poetry – Love, Despite the Ache – won the 2017 Literary Award for Poetry from the Hamilton Arts Council.
CHRIS BANKS is a Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator forthcoming from Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, American Poetry Journal, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.
SHANE NEILSON is a poet, physician, and critic from New Brunswick who has spent his adult life writing about disability and his practising life attending to mental illness. In Saving, Shane writes about the health care both he and his children received at a very difficult time in their lives.
