Oana Avasilchioaei and Stephen Collis read from new books Chambersonic and The Middle

We are pleased to invite you to an event celebrating Chambersonic by Oana Avasilichioaei (Montréal) and The Middle by Stephen Collis (Vancouver), both published by Talonbooks. Come listen to poetry and raise a glass to these two new books that activate a poetic and sonic commons!

About the books:

Chambersonic imagines the book as an acoustic chamber. This collection of poems, essays, performance scores, and audio recordings comes alive with documents, rehearsals, and reverberations, all populated by an ensemble of players, instruments, and materials that make sound together. A conductor fades in and out; the audience acts as choreographer; agencies, noises, and situations test their volumes and energies – until voices morph into notation, signalling the near-silenced, the dissonant, and the ignored.

Written amid wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends Stephen Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering, hiking the shifting treelines of our warming world to reflect on the way all life is on the move. Focusing on the human-plant relationship, each of The Middle’s linked sequences employs various forms of citational practice, rooted in the idea of a “poetic commons,” a kind of literary seed dispersal where words are blown, carried, and scattered from one textual field to another, akin to all the plants and animals in motion on our dangerously heating planet.

About the poets:

Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books
of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010),
and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of
the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves sound, poetry, performance, and translation to expand and trouble ideas of language, histories, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. She has created many performance/sound works that mix electronics, ambient textures, noise, and vocal play, published seven collections of poetry hybrids, most recently Chambersonic (Talonbooks, 2024), award-nominated Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), and written a libretto for a one-act opera Cells of Wind (FAWN Chamber Collective, 2022-24). She’s based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke and at www.oanalab.com.