ABOUT "SWANS" - Michelle Brown’s second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada’s catchiest lyric poets.
ABOUT "CELEBRATE PRIDE WITH LOCKHEED MARTIN" - Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin is a swirl of energy, emotion and observation that takes the reader across the world on a Carmen Sandiego–like journey as well as deep into the complexities of modern queer life. Unabashedly sexual, and embracing a wide range of styles and tones, Byrne’s poems move easily from lines of love and desire to sharp critiques of capitalism and war, and the co-opting of queer culture by them both. These are destabilizing poems, poems filled with glittering imagery and ideas and questions and truths, poems that share the poet’s longing to live in a time that is not “as cruel and unjust / As every other time has been before it.”
READER BIOS:
MICHELLE BROWN'S first full-length collection of poetry, Safe Words, was shortlisted for the 2019 ReLit award. With work recognized by The Malahat Review's Open Season award, CV2's Young Buck prize and the CBC poetry prize, Brown's second book, Swans, was published with Palimpsest Press this spring. She currently resides in Vancouver, BC. https://www.michelle-brown.ca/
JAKE BYRNE is an award-winning queer poet and a non-award-winning copywriter and editor. He is a settler that lives in Tkaron:to on land governed by the Dish With One Spoon Covenant. https://jakebyrnewrit.es/
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the chapbooks Blue Night Express and Salamander Festival. His poems have also appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. In 2012 his poem “Barnacle Goose Ballad” was Reader’s Choice winner for The Walrus Poetry Prize, and in 2020 he was co-winner of the Capilano Review’s Robin Blaser Award. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Guelph University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Intruder is his first book