And one more...

Nora Gould with Charlene Diehl & Ariel Gordon
Reading and In Conversation

When: Thursday, November 1, 7:00 pm
Where: Atrium, McNally Robinson Grant Park (1120 Grant Avenue)
Cost: FREE

Reading I see my love more clearly from a distance (Brick Books) with guest poet Charlene Diehl followed by a conversation moderated by Ariel Gordon.

In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking off a coyote, cutting hay, getting water to the herd in a drought, dehorning. But Prairie anecdotalism this ain’t. What is breathtaking about this book is the relation between its exactness of observation and the grief, horror, and beauty that it documents. What the voice achieves, in its very gestures, is a kind of transcendence: not with the purpose of avoiding pain, but in order to make all of it—all of it—seeable and feelable by a human being.

Nora Gould writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family and volunteers in wildlife rehabilitation with the Medicine River Wildlife Centre. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 1984 with a degree in veterinary medicine.

Guest poet Charlene Diehl is a writer, educator, critic, teacher and the director of THIN AIR, Winnipeg’s annual literary splash. She has published essays, poetry, non-fiction, reviews, and interviews in journals across Canada, and has to her credit a scholarly book on Fred Wah as well as a collection of poetry, lamentations, and two chapbooks, mm and The Lover’s Handbook. Excerpts from her memoir Out of Grief, Singing, which appeared in Prairie Fire, won a western Canadian Magazine Gold Award. She was the featured poet in the fall 2007 issue of CV2. When she’s not chasing literary language (or her two speedy pre-teens), she edits dig! Magazine, Winnipeg’s little-jazz-engine-that-could.

A conversation between Gould & Diehl will be moderated by fellow poet Ariel Gordon.