FEB 15TH | KFBFRIDAYS

This book is risky, intelligent and generous.
A new kind of narrative.—Ali Blythe

Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s Trauma Head is a quicksilvered mirror—a startling and exquisite sequence of poems. The ‘unspeakable’ reflected is intensely fierce and sublimely sensual. Difficult, devastating, and meticulously crafted, this work is a rewarding chronicle of persistence through the trauma of recovery and return. Speech and soma are disrupted, shattered, unsheathed and reshaped—and they shimmer with Kraljii Gardiner’s luminous strength and control. —Sandra Ridley

Intimate and powerful. An astonishing paradox as Elee Kraljii Gardiner stages a series of verbal break-throughs in her poetic testimony to what is incommunicable during and after a stroke. Trauma Head brings it all home on many levels. —Daphne Marlatt

The unit of composition in Trauma Head is the page used as a mirror, a reflection of the synapses detonated by the poet as she triggers the intricate mechanisms of language. Elee Kraljii Gardiner seizes this linguistic dream (traum) world with skill and playfulness; these are poems to wake up from. —Fred Wah

ELEE KRALJII GARDINER TRAUMA HEAD (Anvil Press) w/ E MARTIN NOLAN STILL POINT (Invisible)

When a book is this good, what to say? Without rhetoric, in intimate detail, Nolan nails it. Behind our sealed windows, converging by accident, at odds, moved only by the metaphysics of money, we hang on a hinge. ‘Between what’s what and what’s coming.’  Will we make it? Fat chance. And yet the poems end on a sliver of hope. ‘Thank you for having us,’ Nolan tells the birds. It may be hello or goodbye. — Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 15TH

knife | fork | book
at The Dark Side Studio | 244 Augusta Avenue | 2nd Floor | Kensington Market | Toronto

Access: We are a second floor walk-up with two all-gender washrooms. Please remove your shoes upon entrance.

ELEE KRALJII GARDINER is the author of the book of poems serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), nominated for the 2017 Raymond Souster Award. She is the co-editor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), a City of Vancouver Book Award finalist, and she is the founder of Thursdays Writing Collective as well as the editor and publisher of eight of its anthologies. Her chapbook Trauma Head (Otter Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award and is a precursor to a second book of poetry by the same name (Trauma Head, Anvil Press, Nov 2018), which was shortlisted for the Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.  www.eleekg.com

E MARTIN NOLAN is a poet, essayist and editor. He edits interviews at The Puritan, where he’s also published numerous essays, interviews and blog posts. He teaches at The University of Toronto. Born and raised in Detroit, he attended Loyola University New Orleans, and received his Master’s in the Field of Creative Writing from The University of Toronto. His essays and poems have appeared in Arc, CNQ and CV2, among others. His non-fiction writing focuses on literature, sports and music. You may know him as Ted