Thursday May 11 7 pm 315 Roncesvalles Ave, Toronto ON
Image of 4 books superimposed on a soft color background with type explaining launch location and date/time already provided above.
Image of book The Suspect We with text describing contents as follows: In The Suspect We, Roxanna Bennett and Shane Neilson collaborate to make a documentary poetics concerning pandemic conditions for the mad, neurodivergent, and disabled. Written while the world huddled indoors, The Suspect We is the product of a poetic friendship as well as a reaction to it.
Throughout, Bennett and Neilson query CanLit politics and care deficiencies as mutually dependent while also taking care of one another through their own work and its address.
Last weekend I attended the Imagination Writers’ Festival at the beautiful Morrin Centre in Quebec City. It had been a longstanding dream to have my work interpreted musically — and it came true on April 16! Depicted are the movements performed by the Orchestre Symphonique du Quebéc & prose description that was juxtaposed to “Deep Religious Faith,” a poem that first appeared in The Walrus and that later was collected in You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations with Goose Lane Editions. Plus a picture of the wonderful trio.
This spring is a busy one for me, and due to the fates, TWO books have been delivered, though the gestation has been long. The Suspect We, a beastly-sized book published with Palimpsest, was written over 2020 in correspondence and collaboration with Roxanna Bennett. We cared for one another in poetry as we reflected on the lack of care in Canlit as related to its enforced conformity of normativity. I do think it’s the first disability-informed correspondence-based collaboration in Canada. I must shout out Jim Johnstone’s editorial care with this one; he wrestled the book into its current form. If you’re interested, order here.
Saving from Great Plains has been worked on since 2012. The memoir concerns my madness and autism as it impacts family life, experience that soon exists with the co-incident serious illnesses of my children whom receive what I deem as inadequate care in the socialized medical system. We survive despite that system and discover little oases of self-care along the way. Order here to read about intergenerational disability.
In December, my friend Jim Johnstone published For the Living, a chapbook concerning . . . living persons! You can order it here.
In October, my friends at swallow::tale press published Revolutionary Doctrine of the True Faith. It’s WILD! And beautifully produced by Feyxuan who really knocks things out of the park, design-wise. Think of them when you’re book-ing! Order it here or if in Canada write me direct. Oh, and the chapbook was reviewed already at the mighty Wordgathering! My gratitude to Diane Wiener!
(1) Cross-Pollinations appearance on Feb 23, 2022 (C-P is a really cool poetry-world interface that is a collaboration between the Health, Arts, and Research Centre out of UNBC and the League of Canadian Poets.) Click here to view.
(2) Interview w/ Colleen Kitts of the CBC in New Brunswick on March 22, click here.
Hi there! I have a few unique book promotional things to tell you about for You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations, my newest baby due out from Goose Lane Editions in like a month or so!!!
1. Cross-Pollinations, League of Canadian Poets, reading w/ S.K. Hughes: Feb 23 2022, 6 pm ET, register here.
In this event, I’m doing something I don’t think has been done before. S.K. Hughes reads poems that are structured around their developmental stage of medical training, and I’m reading from an unpublished lyric essay that critiques the use of poetry in medical spaces from the perspective of practitioner and disabled bodymind, also from the perspective of developmental stage. It’ll be weird! What I’m reading is more poetry than essay. Do register on the link provided below! There’s lots here for both poets and medical types. And if you haven’t already, and might be so inclined, please do consider preordering You May Not Take.
I’m anticipating this event very much, for I’ve never been able to critique medicine to its face with poetry before, using twenty five years of a poetry practice to inform this argument: hey, medicine, you’ve got it all wrong. But it’s okay. Just let poetry be itself and everything will be okay.
2. “Articulating the Body: Ekphrasis in the Maude Abbott Medical Museum” is a McGill-based in-person event I’m running in conjunction with the Poetry Matters team. March 10 2022, 5-7 pm. Sign up here. Tell all your friends in Montreal!
3. March 24 2022, 8-10 pm EST. I’m participating at AWP as part of the “Rad Reading Series” thanks to Swallow::tale, Newfound, and ANMLY. Sign up using code on the sheet. My first big boy pants AWP reading, yay!
4. EAST COAST TOUR in late April! Details tba. IN PERSON
The third in a unique series of critical texts by Shane Neilson, Marginal includes material intended for Margin of Interest (PQL, 2019), the author’s book of literary criticism on the English language poetry of the Maritimes. The work collected in Marginal is not secondary or inferior to the earlier PQL text, as Neilson intended the original to be a two-volume project. Marginal is a realization of that vision.
Marginal covers/mentions the following writers and makers: M. Travis Lane, Wayne Clifford, Peter Sanger, Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, J.J. Steinfeld, David Helwig, Anne Compton, George Elliott Clarke, EJ Pratt, John Steffler, John Thompson, bp Nichol, Hermenegilde Chiasson, and David Brewer.
Marginal contains:
Introduction
How Not to Represent a Region: Coastlines and Overfishing
The Backwards Sobriquet: A Review of New Brunswick at the Crossroads: Literary Ferment And Social Change in the East
Dr. Acorn, or: how I joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and learned to love the stern nurse fusion bomb sun
We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Woke White Male & Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems
Heroes & Legends: Finding John Thompson with Peter Sanger
Visiting Lane
Visiting Wayne Clifford
Crossing the Campus: Introduction to M. Travis Lane’s Heart on Fist
Clifford the Not-Sonneteer
A shared text is an act of friendship
Math, Satire, and Sense: David Helwig’s Seawrack
In Some More Distant Key: An Interview With David Helwig
Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: On J. J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds
Return to Scoudouc: A Review of Hermenegilde Chiasson’s To Live and Die in Scoudouc. Translated by Jo-Anne Elder
Rabbittown Press, David Brewer, Prop.
Obituary
Angelic Salutation
Idiosyncratic Notes on the Essays
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
If you’re interested in purchasing copies (only serious queries), then use the message function on this site. $500 per book, $1250 for all 4 in the series. If you are a Canadian university library, I’m afraid only one university per province will be allocated a copy (with one exception). I hope it was you!
Shane Neilson 