Poetry Reading: Translating Air

knife | fork | book, 244 Augusta Ave, Toronto, ON
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Join Kath MacLean at knife | fork | book for a reading of her latest poetry collection, Translating Air. This event is a co-reading with Paul Vermeersch.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Translating Air Kath MacLean imagines conversations between the modernist poet H.D. and Sigmund Freud during the poet's sessions with him in 1933 to 1934 and the dialogues that continued long afterwards in H.D.'s own mind.

Shadowed by uncertainty and memory lapses or blinded by flashes of profound truth, readers are transported to a world of myth, continuity, and human connection. H.D.'s palimpsest account of herself as girl and woman, writer and Imagist, and psychic and spiritualist is engaging and elastic as it pulls readers into a space where time is both endless and sure. Questioning her sanity and a world gone mad with war, H.D.'s personal accounts help us understand what it means to love deeply, to feel passionately, and to think beyond the limits of our individual consciousness.

"Translating Air is sensuous, brainy, incredibly smart writing. Kath MacLean's encounters with the poet H.D. navigate modernism's complex waters - its mythic undercurrents, 'spinning bones,' and a world ravaged by war - creating a poetic palimpsest at once lush and visceral. MacLean's erudition never gets in the way of her lyric ear and powerhouse-voice battened down by iconic images: roses, blood, amber, light. Apocalyptic. Glorious." Jeanette Lynes, author of The Small Things that End the World