Shelf Life Books

Book Launch: The Response of Weeds by Bertrand Bickersteth

Thursday April 09 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us at Shelf Life Books for the launch of Bertrand Bickersteth's poetry book The Response of Weeds. Bertrand will be joined by Cheryl Foggo, whose book Pourin' Down Rain is quoted in Bickersteth's book.

Bertrand Bickersteth's debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province's character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too.

Born in Sierra Leone, Bertrand Bickersteth grew up in Edmonton, Calgary, and Olds, Alberta. After an English degree at UBC, Bertrand continued studying in the U.K. and later taught in the U.S. A return to Alberta provided him with new insights on black identity and most of his writing has been committed to these perspectives ever since.. Although he writes in several genres, anticlimactically, the topic is always the same: what does it mean to be black and from the prairies? He has also given many public talks including a TED Talk for BowValleyCollegeTEDx called The Weight of Words. His poetry has appeared in several publications, including most recently The Antigonish Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Fieldstone Review. He has also been published in The Great Black North and the forthcoming anthology The Black Prairie Archives (2020). In 2018, he was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and writes everywhere.

Innana Authors Reading

Thursday April 16 | 7:00PM - 9:00PM

Join us for a literary reading with three Innana Publications authors: Cecelia Frey, Anne Sorbie, and Lisa de Nikolits.

Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits is an award-winning author whose work has appeared on recommended reading lists for both Open Book Toronto and the 49th Shelf, as well as being chosen as a Chatelaine Editor's Pick and a Canadian Living Magazine Must Read. Her published novels include: The Hungry Mirror; West of Wawa; A Glittering Chaos; The Witchdoctor's Bones; Between The Cracks She Fell; The Nearly Girl; No Fury Like That (which will be published in Italian, under the title Una furia dell'altro mondo, in 2019); and Rotten Peaches. Lisa lives and writes in Toronto and is a member of the Sisters in Crime, Toronto Chapter, Sisters in Crime, Mesdames of Mayhem, The International Thriller Writers.

Anne Sorbie was born in Paisley, Scotland and she lives in Calgary. Her fiction, poetry, essays and book reviews have been published by The University of Alberta Press, Frontenac House, House of Blue Skies, and Thistledown Press; in magazines and journals such as Alberta Views, Geist, and Other Voices; and online with Brick Books, CBC Canada Writes, Geist, and Wax Poetry and Art. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Red Deer College and Mount Royal University and is a past editor of dANDelion Magazine. Falling Backwards Into Mirrors is her third book.

Cecelia Frey is the author of fifteen books of fiction and poetry as well as works of non-fiction and award-winning plays. She has worked as an editor, teacher, and freelance writer, and has for many years been involved in the Calgary literary community. Her short stories and poetry have been published in dozens of literary journals and anthologies as well as being broadcast on CBC radio and performed on the Women's Television Network. Numerous reviews, essays and articles have appeared in a wide range of publications including newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and journals as varied as Westworld and Canadian Literature. Her novel, A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing, was shortlisted for the 2009 Writers Guild of Alberta (WGA) George Bugnet Fiction Award and she is a three-time recipient of the WGA Short Fiction Award. Her most publications include novels The Long White Sickness (2013) and Moments of Joy (2015); and a collection of poetry North (2017).

Book Launch: Adèle Barclay and David Ly

Sunday May 03 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM

Join us for the Calgary launch of new poetry collections by two Vancouver poets, Adèle Barclay and David Ly. Adèle and David will be joined by guest readers Amy LeBlanc and Neil Surkan.

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Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate, these poems are both abject and sweet as they repurpose loss into life and test the bounds of how much a poem can hold.

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch, glitterMOB, The Puritan, PRISM international and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016), was nominated for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is Arc Magazine’s Poet in Residence and an editor at Rahila’s Ghost Press. She lives on unceded Coast Salish territory/Vancouver, BC.

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In Mythical Man, David Ly builds, and then tears down, an army of men in a quest to explore personhood in the 21st century. Tenderness, toxic masculinity, nuances of queer love, and questions of race and identity mix in Ly's poetry, casting a spell that enters like "a warm tongue on a first date." Mythical Man is an authentic and accomplished debut.

David Ly is a poet from Vancouver, BC. He graduated SFU with a BA in World Literature, English, and Creative Writing and a Master of Publishing. He is the author of the chapbook Stubble Burn (2018). His poetry has also appeared in publications such as PRISM international, The Puritan, carte blanche, Pulp Literature, The Maynard, Plenitude, and The /t?mz/ Review. He has been long-listed for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Poetry and short-listed for the Magpie Award in Poetry. Mythical Man is David's first full-length collection. Twitter @dlylyly.