An evening of poetry

Bookmark, Charlottetown’s independent bookstore, will host an evening of poetry on June 3 at 7 pm, featuring Maritime poets Cory Lavender, Jessica Hiemstra, and Nick Thran.

 The larger-than-life characters and stories that tumble out of Cory Lavender’s Come One Thing Another assert the experiences of generations of Lavenders and Roys as a kind of rural epic, transposing ordinary occurrences into the ageless framework of myth and its preoccupation with shifting identities and values and the persistent transformations of people and places. Colloquial, humourous, exuberant, shot through with reverie, these poems are carefully crafted love songs for a vibrant heritage. 

Lavender is a poet of African Nova Scotian and European descent living in Mi’kma’ki. His work has appeared in journals such as Grain, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and The Fiddlehead, and in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis.

 Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death. One moment tender, the next moment dark, hard, and raw, Blood Root blends diary entries, drawings, and lyricism to hold up a polished mirror to colonialism and its echoing impact.

Hiemstra is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy.

 The poems in Nick Thran’s Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages. 

Thran’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display and three previous collections of poems.  His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry.