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.