In partnership with Glass Bookshop, Michael Lithgow will be reading from his new poetry collection and answering questions from the chat.

A recording of the event with closed captions will be made available 24-48 hours later on YouTube.

About the book:

In this second poetry collection by Michael Lithgow, intimations of something numinous and larger than life jostle with the material demands of the everyday, sparking an uncertainty about what lurks at the edges of things, if anything at all. The poems drift in the tension between a pleasing suburban life simply lived and unsettling moments that pull against it, intrusions of the surreal.

Civic uncertainty in the wilderness gives way to more intimate modes of circumspection, a working-through of different kinds of grieving — for a parent who withers from cancer, for family members murdered in war, for the platforms of death on which common conveniences like grocery stores depend.

The poems weigh harsh realities against promises of life and renewal, struggling to put into words something that would rather not be named. They are a thought-provoking meditation on being haunted by darker and more beautiful shadows than are apparent on a life's face level.

About the poet:

Michael Lithgow’s first collection of poetry, Waking in the Tree House, was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation First Book Award. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary and academic journals and in Best Canadian Poetry (2012). Born in Ottawa, he changed cities frequently in his early years and moved to Vancouver in the mid-1980s, working as an activist journalist in community-based media and as a paralegal, before attending graduate school in Montreal and Ottawa to complete a PhD in Communication Studies. He currently lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughter, and teaches at Athabasca University.