Join Hannah Green for the launch of her debut poetry collection Xanax Cowboy (House of Anansi Press) featuring a reading and a conversation hosted by Clarise Foster.

The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Hannah Green’s edgy, often darkly comedic debut, Xanax Cowboy, is a long poem that considers the romanticization of addiction and mental illness (particularly in relation to the notion of the artist) via the romanticization of the Wild West.

The Xanax Cowboy has a reputation like a rattlesnake. She might as well be a strike-anywhere match in a gasoline ghost town. Her whiskey is mixed with vengeance like her mind is mixed with pills. The last doctor who told her she ain't nothin' is still spitting blood through a split lip.

“I’ve never read anything quite like Xanax Cowboy, with its lassoed dream logic or its pistol-drawn showdown with dread. But that’s life when you live in a Wild West of anxiety, and nowhere else can you find this prescription-laced, wasp-sting aesthetic. Hannah Green’s poems are a form-bending live wire, a chainsaw ethos that carves its way through the desert sunset. A long howl in cowboy boots that refuses to be wrangled, Xanax Cowboy is original and compelling.” —Andrew Faulkner, author of Heady Bloom

Hannah Green is a writer and poetry editor at CV2. She was a poetry finalist for the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Winnipeg.

Host Clarise Foster is the former, long-time Editor of CV2 and currently lapsed poet. She lives and writes in Winnipeg with her three dogs and tenaciously cranky cat.