The Trio Prize Performance

On April 9th, Sarah Tolmie presented the Trio Prize to Erica de la Cruz, a 2013 piano graduate from the University of Waterloo.

The Trio Prize of $500 was a composition prize offered to music students and recent graduates at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo, to set 7-10 sonnets from Trio to music.

Students submitted a score for piano and voice for one single poem in February to an inter-university panel of judges (Mark Vuorinen and Tim Corlis, UW, and Daniel Lichti and Lee Willingham, WLU).

Check out Erica’s prize-winning work in this video.

Erica has received the prize as a commission to complete a suite of settings for poems from the book, of her choice, for a public performance in the fall of 2015. Stay tuned!

TRIO Poem Selection for National Poetry Month

Toronto! Come out ‘n celebrate our Spring ’15 poetry releases with us at the

MacLennan Poetry Series 2015 Launch

Wednesday, May 6th
6:00 – 8:00PM
Ben McNally Books
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Sarah Tolmie will be reading from her first collection, the sonnet sequence Trio, and Bruce Whiteman from his latest, Tablature.

A collection of 120 sonnets in eight parts, Trio reveals, frame by frame, a married fortysomething female narrator in love with two younger men – an intellectual and a dancer – and torn between the claims of body and mind.

In the tradition of Renaissance sonnet sequences from Petrarch onward, the narrator’s love objects are constantly before her eyes, and thus before ours, creating compassion, comedy, and desire. They are real and imaginary, opposite and complementary, present and unavailable, autonomous and dependent. Tolmie’s characters circle and shadow one another in every dance, spinning until fantasy becomes flesh and entanglement. In immortalizing the beloved, she draws on the power of both poetic and human reproduction.

Like the contact improvisation modern dance form that influences the collection, these poems are both expressive and analytical. Through a singular feminist revision of a traditional poetic form, they tell the story – sometimes raunchy, sometimes crushingly sad – of a strong protagonist and the predicament she’s in.

To learn more about this book, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.