January Notes
It’s been a busy time recently both at the press and in the wild, with Gaspereau Press authors receiving attention near and far.
Awards
Bren Simmers, author of If, When, won the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize for her poem “Spell World Backwards.”
Annick MacAskill won the 2022 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for her 2022 collection Shadow Blight.
7 to 5 by Michael Meagher was named a finalist for the 2022 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry.
Congratulations to each of these authors!
Interviews & Press Coverage
CBC interviewed Annick MacAskill.
Shadow Blight was named a best 2022 poetry title by CBC.
Annick MacAskill interviewed Matt Robinson for PRISM.
Adrienne Fitzpatrick reviewed The Tree Whisperer: Writing Poetry by Living in the World by Harold Rhenisch.
Marsha Lederman of the Globe and Mail named Shadow Blight a top read of 2022.
Tender by Sylvia D. Hamilton was recommended by Quill & Quire as a book of the year.
49th Shelf and The Coast interviewed Annick MacAskill.
The Ampersand reviewed Shadow Blight.
Devil’s Artisan issue no. 91 includes a review of Literarum Ex Arboribus: An Exuberant Showing of the Wood Type at Gaspereau Press by g.a. chishti.
New Releases
World Naked Bike Ride by Lisa Fishman – “It was not a likely time for stories, but some of us wanted to hear stories,” writes Lisa Fishman in her debut collection of short fiction. Entwining an exacting attention to language and impression with seemingly plainspoken narrative, the forty stories of World Naked Bike Ride often achieve the cadence of old-world fable, drawing the reader across porous boundaries—between people, times, places, selves, and even between reality and unreality.
The Filling Station by Leesa Deen – 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.
Q&As
Over the past five or six months, Gaspereau has published three-question Q&As with various Gaspereau Press authors and posted them to the press’s Facebook page. You can find direct links to some of the recent Q&As here:
Miscellany
Annick MacAskill and a number of other poets (Anna Quon, Nanci Lee, Jaime Forsythe, Tiffany Morris, and Samantha Sternberg) read poems from Shadow Blight at the Halifax Central Library on January 17.
The Shore published a new poem by Michael Goodfellow, and Verse Daily promoted two poems (“Saw” and “Hungry”) from his 2022 collection Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography.
Annick MacAskill and shalan joudry read poems for the SMU Reading Series in December.
Upcoming Events
George Elliott Clarke and other poets will read at Halifax Central Library, February 12 at 2 p.m.
Sylvia D. Hamilton will launch her latest poetry collection, Tender, at University of King’s College, Alumni Hall, January 25 at 7 p.m.
Michael Goodfellow and other poets will read poems at LaHave River Books, April 8 at 4 p.m.
The 2023 Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose will take place on Saturday, October 21.