Join Frontenac House, Gaspereau Press, and Flying Books for a double book launch of Ben Gallagher’s A Grief Cave and Leesa Dean’s The Filling Station on Tuesday November 29th from 6:30 to 8:00 pm.
A Grief Cave is a heartbreaking and life-affirming debut collection. In it, Ben Gallagher searches for the “secret face in the dark” of his partner who died suddenly nine years ago. The book—arcing out of darkness toward a new relationship and children, shades of light—remains excruciatingly open despite immense pain. “After a death ... // the exact volume of a cathedral / a lit candle / curve in the road at night ...” Gallagher’s A Grief Cave keeps a steady focus on the world as it evolves around him, pursuing the "trace of desire's echo" through the passage of time. The result is immersive and cathartic.
Ben Gallagher lives in West Dublin, Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia) with his wife and two children. He is a Zen practitioner with the Oak Tree in the Garden sangha. He currently teaches poetry in the Creative Writing department of Dalhousie University.
A figure in an Elizabeth Bishop poem—a charming Brazilian man named Manuelzinho,“the worst gardener since Cain”—so piqued Leesa Dean’s interest that she mined words and images from Bishop’s body of work in order to create a larger world for him to occupy. The result is The Filling Station, a lyrical novella-in-verse drawn uniquely from Bishop’s lexicon in which Manuelzinho takes a wife (and a lover), has a daughter, and grieves his dying father. Shifting from rain-soaked villages to the barren, haunting landscape of Itabira, this novella is a compelling example of poetry’s extraordinary capacity for encapsulating human experiences—love, time, memory— and for reanimating those experiences in the reader’s imagination.
Leesa Dean is a graduate of Concordia (BA) and the University of Guelph's (MFA) Creative Writing programs and teaches Creative Writing at Selkirk College in Castlegar, British Columbia. Her previous publications include Waiting for the Cyclone, nominated for the 2017 Trillium and ReLit Awards, and the poetry chapbook The Desert of Itabira. Her novella-in-verse, The Filling Station, is forthcoming with Gaspereau Press in November 2022, and she has a second chapbook., Apogee/Perigee, forthcoming with above/ground press in 2023. She lives on an acreage with her husband and daughter in the very rural hamlet of Krestova, BC.
Admission is free. All are welcome to attend.
Books will be available for purchase, and, of course, the authors will be signing!
Masks are recommended and encouraged but not required.