Writers Read: 15 poets, playwrights and novelists

He is the author of Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, (Playwrights Canada Press, 2014) which won the Governor General’s Award for Drama. “Jordan Tannahill challenges us to ask what makes theatre vital,” Queyras says.

Here’s a passage from Tannahill’s latest book, Theatre of the Unimpressed (Coach House 2014), a look at the current state of English-language theatre:

Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendence that kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between?
 

September 25: Mary Ruefle

On Friday, September 25, Writers Read will welcome poet Mary Ruefle to Concordia. 

The Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont, Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry, including Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle.

Roll Deep (WW Norton and Co., 2915) is his latest collection.

“Jackson is part of a generation of American poets who give voice to a fresh urban formalism that I find exciting,” Queyras says. Here’s an excerpt from Jackson’s poem, “The Dadaab Suite,” one of his Urban Renewal poems from Roll Deep:

I have come to Dadaab like an actor
on a press release, unprepared for the drained faces
of famine-fleeing refugees, my craft’s glamour
dimmed by hundreds of infant graves, children
whose lolling heads’ final drop landed on their mothers’
backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell in
this swelter of dust?

Jordan Tannahill’s talk will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 22 in the Visual Arts Visuel (VAV) Gallery (1395 Blvd. René-Lévesque W).

Mary Ruefle will read and discuss her work beginning at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 25, in Room 763 of the Henry F. Hall (H) Building (1455 Blvd. De Maisonneuve W).

Major Jackson will speak at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, September 30 in the York Amphitheatre (Room 1.605) in the Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts (EV) Integrated Complex (1515 Rue St. Catherine W).

Learn more about upcoming Writers Read events.

Check out Sina Queyras giving a short reading of one of Mary Ruefle's poems.