3GénPo is a prepared poetry book launch and peformance in English with interferences and additions in French by three Montreal poets from 3 generations whose practice is mostly in English: Erín Moure, whose first book came out in 1979; Kaie Kellough, whose first book came out in 2005, and Nicole Raziya Fong, whose first book just came out in April, 2019. All their works look critically and humanely at origin, history, phenomenology, thinking, and being via poetry, poetry’s sounds, and via listening to the generations, in Canada and around the world. They have books but reject the commodification of the author and celebrate the conversations poetries engender. They read together so that their works may accompany each other and join listeners and readers, at least for one great evening!
Bring cash if you wish to buy poetry books, please!
NICOLE RAZIYA FONG is an incredible poet and thinker currently based in Montréal. PEЯFACT is her first full-length collection.
PEЯFACT is a muscular and moving debut book of poetry, a three-part series interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity. Alive with influences ranging from Antonin Artaud and Simone Weil to Gertrude Stein and George Oppen, the poems meditate on materiality and consciousness, empathy and awareness, absence and mutuality – the presence of language in the physicality of human thought and experience.
“Part treatise on phenomenology, part theatrical score on ontology, part billet-doux to poetry itself…” Divya Victor
KAIE KELLOUGH is a nationally and internationally acclaimed novelist, poet, and sound performer based in Montréal. His novel Accordéon was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. He has two books of poetry, Lettricity and Maple Leaf Rag, and two albums, Vox:Versus and Creole Continuum.
Magnetic Equator is an inventive and visually stunning exploration of place, identity, language, and experience from acclaimed poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough. These poems drift between South and North America, seeking ancestry in Georgetown, Guyana, in the Amazon Rainforest, and in the Atlantic Ocean, struggling with the state of being hemisphered, of being present here while carrying a heartbeat from elsewhere. They haunt prairie spaces and the snowy boroughs of Montreal, the 1980s bleakness of suburban Calgary, the movement of black ships sailing across to land. Origin here is origined, looped and found, tenuous, aching, full but not replete.
“Magnetic Equator brims with influence and relation, sparking dialogue with Caribbean and Canadian books such as Omeros by Derek Walcott and A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand. Ultimately, Kellough engages with the larger historical experience of diaspora writers and exiles, among whom identity’s hyphen is a ‘divining rod’. Magnetic Equator informs as it enchants with its rare combination of documentary poetics and confessional voice.” –Quill & Quire
ERÍN MOURE is a translator of poetry from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, and the author of eighteen books of poetry. Moure has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Most recently, she has been a two-time finalist and a co-winner of the Kobzar Literary Award. She lives in Montreal.
The Elements is a book about The Good in the face of destructions. Poems about and for Moure’s late father accept his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers — these are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invading armies of Napoleon, and texts detailing the poet’s struggles against monolingualism. By celebrating our ability to think polylingually and plastically across boundaries, and to revolt, The Elements defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”
“The loss of a parent is always an upheaval, from any perspective, one that is universal, and impossible to avoid, but Moure’s rich and remarkable THE ELEM : ENTS (NAM : LOZ) is a book not of loss, per se, but one of what, through him, they had been fortunate enough to have gained through his presence, and even discovered, through the process of his illness, and the papers left behind after his death. — rob mclennan