Fall 2023 Online Season Launch
Gordon Hill Press launches its Fall 2023 season online on Sunday October 15, 3:00 PM EST, with readings from Jennifer Bowering Delisle's Micrographia, Spenser Smith's A Brief Relief from Hunger, and Roxanna Bennett's Uncomfortability read by Khashayar Mohammadi.
You can register here – https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtdOCtrz8jGNccFaaPjW1ibFwp1nP31ySp?#/registration.
About Mictographia – As Jennifer Bowering Delisle was on her path through infertility towards motherhood, she was simultaneously losing her own mother to a rare degenerative neurological disease and an approaching medically-assisted death. The lyric essays in Micrographia explore how losses can collide and reverberate both within our own lives and in our relationships with the rest of the world. How much do we share of our stories, and how much do we understand of what others are experiencing? Ultimately, this is a book about connection; “micrographia” is both the term for the diminished handwriting caused by neurological disease, and the narrative fragments offered here.
About A Brief Relief from Hunger – This is a poetry collection about the yearnings of a young man—cocaine, human connection, fast food—and the ravenous world in which he lives. In Vancouver, the speaker binges Big Macs post-rehab while others consume fentanyl-tainted drugs. Growling bodies are everywhere, including on Facebook where people post cruel comments about drug users in the face of British Columbia’s toxic drug supply crisis. At the heart of the collection are poems that respond to these comments from the perspective of the speaker, now sober but still hungry, whose friends are dying from the contaminated drug supply. The speaker knows at least one reliable source of contentment: Grandma’s kitchen, where, at his lowest points, he finds cabbage rolls, acceptance, and a tenderness he wishes to absorb into his masculinity.
About Uncomfortability – In Roxanna Bennett's third book with Gordon Hill Press, pandemic conditions are explored in their individuated awfulness but also their paradoxical solidarity, the unifying collective status of being somehow constrained, life radically changing due to social proscription. Continuing her development and renovation of the sonnet form established in her previous books, but building on the form by arranging the text into seasonal divisions like a Book of Hours, Uncomfortability is devoted to this question from "Life Without Weather", "Could we begin to love each other’s pain?" The book answers, "No one needs to fight. We are all the same."
