Featuring:

Cephalopography 2.0 by Rasiqra Revulva

Moving to Climate Change Hours by Ross Belot

The Only Card in a Deck of Knives by Lauren Turner

Double Self-Portrait by James Lindsay

Please help us welcome these amazing new collections of poetry into the world on September 30, 2020 at 7:00 P.M.

About The Books

Cephalopography 2.0 by Rasiqra Revulva

Cephalopography 2.0 is as much a passionate celebration of cephalopods in all their plurality and finery as it is a collection of poems exploring human identity and experience through the lens of these marine animals. These experiments with traditional poetic forms such as ghazals, tankas and cinquains, as well as more contemporary forms, make poems that are uniquely and beautifully composed. Cephalopography 2.0 plunges into the depths of human experience to daringly remark on the wild and transformative links between cephalopods and humanity beyond the land and the sea.

Moving to Climate Change Hours by Ross Belot

From industrial accidents to frozen highways, Belot charts what faces a working man in stripped-down lyric poetry. Moving to Climate Change Hours is a solemn ode to the end of oil, filled with poems that have seen it all and can acknowledge the darkness that’s coming while still finding beauty in the arched neck of a tundra swan. With a filmmaker’s sense of atmosphere and an environmentalist’s urgency, Belot’s stark lines take the reader deep into the heart of the industrial man.

The Only Card in a Deck of Knives by Lauren Turner

The Only Card in a Deck of Knives is a groundbreaking new collection in the area of sickness poetry. Within these poems, Lauren Turner aims to reclaim the "hysterical" label given to sick women throughout history. Rather than shying away from the emotional urgency and raw vulnerability surrounding a terminal diagnosis, Turner shines an interrogative light upon it. These fierce poems are written from the perspective of a twentysomething female speaker with a terminal disease, a speaker who is preoccupied with maintaining the illusion of health, but then refers to herself as "dying" in the next line. Fascinated and repelled by the societal impulse to gussy up diseases that take violent, and sometimes deadly, tolls upon women’s bodies, Turner uses these lyric poems to juxtapose the violence of a gendered illness with the violence encountered by women and non-binary people in society. The Only Card in a Deck of Knives unpacks society’s impulse to pull away from sick women and examines why we discredit their professed pain, symptoms and emotions.

Double Self-Portrait by James Lindsay

Double Self-Portrait explores doubling and reproduction in art, memory, culture, nostalgia and fatherhood. Divided by four longer, more autobiographical poems, Double Self-Portrait is a deeply layered collection, one that at times speaks directly to the reader and at other times is meta-textual. Bees, cicadas, music and photography swirl through these poems, bounded as they are by the resistance to and embracing of responsibility. This is a collection where the poems work individually and together, subtly building toward a single theme that slowly coalesces during the reading to create a collection that resonates in your mind long after the book is closed.

About The Authors

Rasiqra Revulva is a queer femme writer, multimedia artist, editor, musician, performer and SciComm advocate. She is an editor of the climate crisis anthology Watch Your Head: A Call to Action, and one half of the experimental electronic duo The Databats (Slice Records, Melbourne; Toronto). She has published two chapbooks of glitch-illustrated poetry: Cephalopography (words(on)pages press, 2016) and If You Forget the Whipped Cream, You’re No Good As A Woman (Gap Riot Press, 2018). Cephalopography 2.0 is her debut collection. Learn more at @rasiqra_revulva, @thedatabats and www.rasiqrarevulva.com.

Ross Belot is a poet, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and an energy and climate change columnist. He previously worked for a major Canadian petroleum company for decades before retiring in 2014. Now he writes ecopoetics and opinion pieces about government climate change inaction. Ross was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2016 and longlisted in 2018. In 2017, he completed an MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California. Born in Ottawa, Ross has made his home in the Golden Horseshoe since 1970.

Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist, who wrote the chapbook, We're Not Going to Do Better Next Time (knife | fork | book, 2018). Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, canthius and elsewhere. She won the 2018 Short Grain Contest and was a finalist for the 2017 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.

James Lindsay is the author of Our Inland Sea and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! He is the co-founder of Pleasence Records and works in book publishing. He lives in Toronto.