Concordia alumni go off the page

Writers Read is a diverse reading series that has featured such authors as Jordan Abel, Dionne Brand, Roxane Gay and Ben Lerner. This year, organizers are pleased to host some of the strongest voices in contemporary literature, all of whom tap into rich traditions of writing by women, racialized and queer subjects.

Off the Page is able to take place with generous support from Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of English, Department of Art History, Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University Alumni Association, Concordia Co-op Bookstore, Librarie Drawn & Quarterly, The Void Magazine, Yiara Magazine and Soliloquies Anthology.

Impressive alumni

Suzanne Buffam has published three books of poetry: Past Imperfect (2005), The Irrationalist (2010) and, most recently, A Pillow Book (2016). Her first collection earned her the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry and was named Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail. The Irrationalist was also a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

In an interview for Maisonneuve with Sina Queyras, MA (Eng.) 95, assistant professor in the Department of English, Buffam talks about wanting to “create a kind of expansive interiority that allows for contemplation” in her poetry.

A Pillow Book guides the reader through the liminal realm of fitful rest, between dreamscapes and frantic, waking thought, while carving out this contemplative space. In this process of weaving, Buffam pens meditative poems straight from the pillow, which are sometimes prosaic and sometimes presented in the form of lists with headings like “Questionable Gestures” and “Sounds I Don’t Expect to Hear.”

Buffam’s juxtapositions of eclectic images and “clean” narrative prose embody the insomniac mind and whisper in the reader’s ear as if we are all invited for the exchange of “pillow talk.”

Sarah Burgoyne, who teaches at Dawson College in Montreal, has released several chapbooks and, most, recently Saint Twin with Mansfield Press. Burgoyne’s Saint Twin has been shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry.

Her work delicately splices together memory and our occupation of it. It is embodied not only in the self, but in the tangible elements of the corporeal. Sarah, though originally from the West Coast, seems to display the acute observational perspective of a Montreal poet: “I’ve filled my cooking pots with plants, / my pink glass with milk.”

Trish Salah teaches in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Salah’s work has been widely published from CV2, The Feminist Wire to Lemon Hound. Her poetry collection Wanting in Arabic won the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.

Salah’s work primarily focuses on transgender issues and the Arab diaspora. In an interview with CWILA, Trish speaks about “the ways in which trans peoples’ [varied] experiences of oppression, body dysphoria, gender as a system, etc., give rise to particular ways of reading the world and the word, and that mobilize trans as analytic or interpretive lens.”

Lyric Sexology: Volume I, Salah most recent work, is a widely celebrated collection; “we specify special measures to exclude / the recurrence of such existence for mechanical fastening.” Nuanced language brings us into contact with our esoteric desires. This point of contact becomes the source of a complex and necessary meditation on what it means to be alive: “Nobody wants to become nobody. / And authentically so, they fear.”

#CUalumni

Related links

• Off the Page
• Department of English
• Department of Art History
• Simone de Beauvoir Institute
• Writers Read
• Lemon Hound
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