Saturday Night Poetry: Sakiru Adebayo, Chris Banks & A.F. Moritz

Join us for a Saturday evening of readings from three new Canadian poetry collections.

Sakiru Adebayo, Wildfire Verses (Nightwood Editions)In 2023, Sakiru Adebayo was evacuated from his home during the McDougall Creek wildfire in the Okanagan. Wildfire Verses grows out of that displacement. The poems sit with climate grief and what it means to become a climate refugee, while still holding on to hope and our ties to the world beyond the human. Adebayo holds the James and Eva Good Chair in English Literature at Western University and is a winner of the Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism.

Chris Banks, Bureau of Useless Splendour (ECW Press)Chris Banks’s eighth collection is playful and accessible. It ranges from DNA sequencing and internet memes to space-time physics and reimagined fortune cookie fortunes, all while searching for hope in an anxious century. Banks is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose first collection, Bonfires, won the Jack Chalmers Award. He is editor in chief of The Woodlot, a Canadian poetry reviews and essays site, and lives in Kitchener.

A.F. Moritz, The Wren (House of Anansi Press)Moritz’s twenty-third book is a gathering of short poems, from single lines to sonnets. At its centre is a poem about a small wren that peeks out of a thicket and slips back inside. Moritz won the Griffin Poetry Prize for The Sentinel and the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Great Silent Ballad, and he served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2023.

Free to attend. Books will be available for purchase on the night.