An Evening of Poetry

Bookmark is hosting two Halifax poets— Annick MacAskill and Nolan Natasha— for An Evening of Poetry in the Bookshop on October 24 at 7 pm.

Annick MacAskill’s poetry collection Votive considers forms of devotion and the often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” The poems explore how stories, old and new, connect experience, and how the quest for love, hope, and meaning persists when language falters. MacAskill’s gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language.

Intimate, nostalgic, and surprising, the poems in Nolan Natasha’s I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? spark connections that alter trajectory and carry lasting resonance. Encounters across phone lines, over drinks, through walkie-talkies, and unspoken recognitions between queer bodies fill this collection with explorations of what it means to be seen. The micro-narratives in the collection both celebrate and grieve the connections they illuminate.

Annick MacAskill was the winner of a 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Shadow Blight. Her previous collections include Murmurations, No Meeting Without Body, and two chapbooks. Annick is a member of Room Magazine’s Growing Room Collective and publisher of micropress Opaat Press. She lives in Halifax.

 Nolan Natasha is a queer and trans writer living in Halifax. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Puritan, The Stinging Fly, Event, Grain, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Plenitude. He has been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, the Geist Postcard Contest, Room Magazine’s poetry contest, and the Atlantic Writing Competition, and was runner-up for the Thomas Morton Fiction Prize.