Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting Megan Fernandes, Joshua Neves, and Alexei Perry Cox for a reading; the former two from newly published work, and the latter from a forthcoming collection of poems. 

Joshua Neves, Canada Research Chair and Director of the Global Emergent Media lab at Concordia University, started us off, reading from Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy, which is releasing through Duke University Press in early March. Neves thanked the full house, then detailed the decade that went into writing the book; he explained that it is "a slow book about fast changes."

Neves was followed by Alexei Perry Cox, who read a selection of poems -- delicately composed, intent, and potent -- from an as-of-yet unpublished manuscript. Bubbling to the surface was eco-imagery -- planting seeds, touching soil -- and the act of thinking through and amidst motherhood. One of many standout lines: "Teaching philosophy in Gaza is like leaning your head out the window."

Finally, Megan Fernandes took the stage. Reading from Good Boys, recently published via Tin House Books, Fernandes was hilarious, gracious, and generous. Her poems move quickly and sting on impact, they are like lyric elastic-bands shot from the fingers. From a poem titled "nukemap.com": "you can’t name something that can kill 1.8 million people / even if you are its mother." Moving to a poem titled "Why We Drink", she joked: "they're all bummers, sorry." Though her work does indeed spend its attentions on the crises and calamities with which we enter the new decade, its lyric buoyancy and swift intelligence counterbalance the dread; these poems are equally sobering and exhilarating. 

A big thank you to Tin House Books, to the Montrealers who braved the cold, and most of all to the three wonderful authors!