Poet, editor, & founder of literary annual Freeman’s John Freeman joins Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Karen Solie for an evening of readings on Thursday, March 9 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Flying Books, 784 College St. (near Shaw), Toronto. Join us!
Wind, Trees is John Freeman’s most recent book — a politically urgent yet timeless collection that studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love. Freeman presents a meditation on power and loss, change, and adaptation. What can the trees teach us about inhabiting space together? What might we gain if we admit we do not control the wind and cannot possibly carry all we’ve been handed? Through narrative lyric and metaphysical pulse, meandering thought and punctuating quiet, Freeman studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.
The Caiplie Caves is Karen Solie’s striking fifth collection, in which she inhabits a figure inspired by Ethernan, an Irish missionary in the seventh century who retreated to the Caiplie Caves on the eastern coast of Scotland to consider life as a hermit. Ethernan’s story is remarkable for the mysticism embedded in the ordinary. These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief.
John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s, and an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Tales of Two Planets, which features dispatches from around the world, where the climate crisis has unfolded at crucially different rates. His poetry collections include Maps and The Park. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, Orion and Zyzzyva. He is a former editor of Granta and a Writer in Residence at New York University.
Karen Solie has won the Griffin Poetry Prize, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Pat Lowther Award, and The Caiplie Caves was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Her work has been translated into seven languages and has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Australia, including in the sixth edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is currently on the creative writing faculty with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Books will be available for purchase, and, of course, the poets will be signing.
Admission is free. Masks are recommended but not required.