Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Sunday, August 27th at 2pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, Book*hug Press, Mawenzi House Publishers, Write Bloody North, and Talonbooks in presenting the poetry reading Imperial Currents with Fareh Malik, Hasan Namir, Brandon Wint, and Ivan Drury Zarin.
Imperial Currents brings together four dynamic poets navigating colonialism, racism, masculinity and their overlaps. Join us for an exploration of collectivity and the power of story to breathe hope into being.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free and required for entrance.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.
Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
About the books:
Streams That Lead Somewhere (Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd., 2022)
Fareh Malik’s debut collection, Streams That Lead Somewhere, aims to explore the intersection between mental illness and social racialization. The poet dives deep into his long history with Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of discrimination. The book focuses on perseverance and the silver lining that is ever on the horizon with the expectation that you can make it out of any trial or tribulation, if you just follow your dream to wherever it leads.
War / Torn (Book*hug Press, 2019)
Lambda Literary Award-winner Hasan Namir’s debut collection of poetry, War / Torn, is a brazen and lyrical interrogation of religion and masculinity—the performance and sense of belonging they delineate and draw together. Namir summons prayer, violence, and the sensuality of love, revisiting tenets of Islam and dictates of war to break the barriers between the profane and the sacred.
Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020)
Divine Animal is the debut poetry book by celebrated, Ontario-born poet and spoken word performer Brandon Wint. The collection is an elegant, expansive mapping of Brandon Wint’s relationship to the legacy and wake of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, as one of its living, Black descendants. The Atlantic ocean is figured as both a historical site and diasporic metaphor from which to explore the complex journeys and negotiations that brought his family to Canada from Jamaica and Barbados.
Divine Animal reckons with the ways the logic of colonialism has brought humankind into an era of ecological devastation, climate change catastrophe and eco-grief. In this way, Brandon Wint offers a thoughtful, empathetic poetics that seeks to re-connect the human world with the natural world. Above all, Divine Animal is a work that lives powerfully at the intersection of celebration and grief. These poems testify to the realities of beauty on Earth, while casting a necessary eye upon the human proclivity to invent sophisticated, resilient modes of violence and inequity.
Un (Talonbooks, 2022)
Against a backdrop of moderate gains and terrible defeats, Un laments socialism’s failure to deliver formerly colonized peoples out of imperialism’s terrible grasp. Drawing on the US War on Terror and the disappearances of people extrajudicially apprehended from the Middle East and North Africa, this collection of poetry interrogates the subjectivity of Western revolutionary socialism in the early twenty-first century. Absence, negation, and unbeing echo throughout the text: the negativity of a global class struggle now forty years in retreat. But because Un’s philosophical method is dialectical, negation does not mean hopelessness or final defeat. Instead, Un hints at new revolutionary possibilities – the emergence of old, tidal syntheses – through the combination of historical difficulty with the arrival of unknown days ahead.
About the authors
Iraqi-Canadian author Hasan Namir graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BA in English and received the Ying Chen Creative Writing Student Award. He is the author of God in Pink (2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction and was chosen as one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 by The Globe and Mail. His work has also been featured on Huffington Post, Shaw TV, Airbnb, in the film God in Pink: A Documentary, Breakfast Television Toronto, CTV Morning Live Saskatoon. He was recently named a writer to watch by CBC books. He is also the author of poetry book War/Torn (2019, Book*Hug Press), children’s book The Name I Call Myself (2020, Arsenal Pulp Press), Umbilical Cord (Book*Hug Press) and Banana Dream (2023, Neal Porter Books). Hasan was the 2021 LGBTQ2s+ guest curator for Word Vancouver. He lives on the unceded territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen First Nations with his husband and their child.
Fareh Malik is an author and artist from the Greater Toronto Area. Originally a spoken word poet, he has been recognized internationally by many literary presses and has won several poetry awards in his emerging career. Recently, he was named the 2022 PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, and his book Streams That Lead Somewhere was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist, educator and multi-disciplinary storyteller based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon is ever-grateful for the power of poetry as a spiritual technology and social force. He is devoted to using poetry as a tool for refining his sense of justice, love, and intimacy. Brandon Wint’s poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. His debut film, My Body Is A Poem/The World Makes With Me screened at DOXA documentary film festival in 2023.
Ivan Drury Zarin is a long time socialist organizer, writer, and publisher, who lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqeam, and Tsleil Waututh nations, in Vancouver. He is a new parent with family around Vancouver, central Saskatchewan, and western Belarus. He teaches history and labour studies at Fraser International College at SFU and drives a paratransit bus as a member of the Amalgamated Transit Union. He is the author of Un, a book of poems published by Talon Books in 2022, and is editor and contributor to Red Braid Alliance’s book of essays, A Separate Star: Politics and Strategy for Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Colonial, and Anti-Imperialist Struggle, published by ARP Books in 2023.