Manx Pub •
370 Elgin St.
5:00pm
Free
Plan 99 Poetry
Jacqueline Turner, K.B. Thors and Nikki Reimer
Hosted by David O'Meara
Saturday
Oct , 2019
26
Reading Jacqueline Turner’s Flourish makes us want to write, to remember; also to sing, then read, then cry, and re-read. We’re reading it while thinking about reading, and remembering. What the book makes us want to do is re-think it all, and re-think remembering it all, and remember re-thinking it—and most of all—to keep reading this, to keep this reading.
Join us at the Manx as we partner with the Plan 99 Reading Series for a late afternoon of stunning live poetry.
Jacqueline Turner’s Flourish moves between philosophy, literary criticism, biography, and poetry. Both personal and experimental, her writing becomes transformative as it explores memories of growing up in a small town, parenting a set of adventurous sons, traveling, and reading. At times her poems act like micro essays; at other times they are miniature memoirs or precise manifestos, and throughout the collection’s exploration of contemporary cities and culture, a tense beauty emerges.
Grappling with queerness and trauma from Alberta to Brooklyn, powering through body, sex, and gender to hit free open roads, in Vulgar Mechanics, K. B. Thors seeks to invent new strategies for survival through the two most basic tools available to the speaker: language and the body. Moving from the fracked landscapes of the prairies to the steep verticality of New York, this is a collection concerned with hunger, anger, and the shifting fault-lines between play and pain.
My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan by Nikki Reimer is a darkly humorous book about grief and isolation. Cutting yet tender, sorrowful yet angry, these poems touch on death and loss, architecture, alcohol, horse statues, and catalogues of life. Pull up a chair, get a drink—a Rose Manhattan, a quartz gimlet, or a gourmet ginger ale, if you prefer. A rose is a rose is a Rose Manhattan.
Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.