Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Monday, October 2nd at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, McGill-Queen’s University Press and Goose Lane Editions in welcoming Maureen Hynes with guest Kim Trainor.
Hynes’ Take the Compass and Trainor’s A thin fire runs through me travel in time through the troubled present and into our perilous collective futures, interrogating existence, courage, and complexity on the journey.
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
Take the Compass (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023)
A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Maureen Hynes’s Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey—into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in these pandemic times when our “journeying” is confined or even curtailed, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. And of course, one of those journeys is discovering where language can take us.
The poems in Take the Compass travel through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests and graveyards. They travel in time through the troubled present, across decades into early childhood and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will “ward off adversity,” and help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things – personal values and traits, such as courage – to “break the bad news into nine living petals.”
As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes.
A thin fire runs through me (Goose Lane Editions, 2023)
In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters.
Written over an intense nine-month period in 2016 and 2017 amidst the stresses of heartbreak, depression, and the progression of a new love, Trainor’s exquisite sequence of short poems offers meditations on different hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Incorporating fragments from reportage on current events, Jewish liturgy, and lyric poetics, she latches her readers to the present while acknowledging the inescapable presence of the past.
About the poets
Maureen Hynes lives in Dish with One Spoon territory/Toronto, and is the author of six collections of poetry, including Take the Compass, from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her first collection won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and following collections have been finalists for the League’s Raymond Souster Award, and twice for the Pat Lowther Award, as well as the Golden Crown Literary Award for lesbian writers (U.S). Her poetry has been included in over 30 anthologies, including three times in Best Canadian Poems in English (2010, 2016 and 2020), and in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2021). Maureen has given numerous poetry workshops and has taught at the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing certificate program. (www.maureenhynes.com).
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. A thin fire runs through me appeared with icehouse poetry in 2023. A blueprint for survival will appear in Spring 2024 with Guernica Editions. Her poems have appeared in Anthropocenes (AHIP), Ecocene, ISLE, Ecozon@, Dark Mountain (UK) and Fire Season I and II (Vancouver). Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin) and at +the Institute [for experimental art] (Athens), as well as in Ireland and the US. Her current project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC, which she has co-curated with the artist Amy-Claire Huestis, and which features contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders.