Poetry launch: The Sacred Heart Motel by Grace Kwan

“I’m sick / of outsourcing care to desire” writes Grace Kwan in this sure-footed, arrestingly wise début, and this axis, between fantasies of belonging and the experience of being held, is perhaps at the core of the book, threaded through each poem. If “again and again I’ve abandoned my urgency / for the romance of cruelty,” how does that self in each of us return?

— River Halen, author of Dream Rooms

Join Grace Kwan for the Toronto launch of THE SACRED HEART MOTEL, taking place at Another Story Bookshop.

Featuring special guest Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi

In poet Grace Kwan’s debut, they are ruthless and nimble, guiding us through the recesses of body and roadside space. The reader tours the motel through this multiverse narrative, from amenities to rooms to back alleys, through the generations of ghosts and queer love stories, until they are left alone with the heart at the centre. The Sacred Heart Motel is a disorienting, startling collection about placelessness and longing.

Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer based in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their recent poetry appears in Canthius, Room Magazine, and others. Find them at https://grckwn.wordpress.com/.

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator.

Another Story Bookshop has a step-free entrance but no wheelchair accessible washrooms. We ask that attendees wear masks.