Kelly Drukker at Trois-Rivières Poetry Festival

Various Locations, Trois-Rivières, QC G9A
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Kelly Norah Drukker will read at 4 events during this year's Festival International de la Poésie in Trois-Rivières.

The Festival will feature over 75 poets, from Quebec, Canada, and around the world, at a series of readings and cultural events across the city of Trois-Rivières. The readings will take place in French, and in the poets' mother tongue.

Events will be held at various venues around town. Download nifty festival map here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Winner of the 2016 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Winner of the 2016 Concordia University First Book Prize
Finaliste pour le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal (2016)

Tracing a series of journeys, real and imagined, Kelly Norah Drukker’s Small Fires opens with a section of poems set on Inis Mór, a remote, Irish-speaking island off the west coast of County Galway, where the poet-as-speaker discovers the ways in which remnants of the island’s early Christian monastic culture brush up against island life in the twenty-first century.

Also present is a series of poems set in the Midi-Pyrénées and in the countryside around Lyon. Linked to the shorter poems in the collection by landscape, theme, and tone is a set of longer narrative poems that give voice to imagined speakers who are, each in a different way, living on the margins. The first describes a young emigrant woman’s crossing from Ireland to Canada in the early twentieth century, where she must sacrifice her tie to the land for the uncertain freedom of a journey by sea, while a second depicts the lives of silk workers living under oppressive conditions in Lyon in the 1830s.

In detailed and musical language, the poems in Small Fires highlight aspects of landscape and culture in regions that are haunted by marginal and silenced histories. The collection concludes with a long poem written as a response to American writer Paul Monette’s autobiographical work Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.