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Montreal launch of The Sacred Heart Motel
December 6 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Free
“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 Montreal launch of THE SACRED HEART MOTEL, taking place at Co-op Agenda in Petite-Patrie.
Featuring special guests Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch and Carlos A. Pittella
Food! Drinks! Readings! Heart-shaped key chains!
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/.
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer living in Tio’tià:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their book knot body (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize. The Good Arabs (2021), published by Metonymy Press, was the winner of the 2022 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and received an Honorable Mention from the 2022 Arab American Book Awards for the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award.
Carlos A. Pittella (he/him) is a Latinx poet & the recipient of a Frontier 2022 Global Poetry Prize. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he lives in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke & currently teaches Poetry at John Abbott College. He completed his MA in English/Creative Writing at Concordia University, where he co-edited Headlight Anthology with the team who won the 2023 Forces AVENIR award. He also holds a doctorate in Literary Studies, having defended his thesis on the trilingual sonnets of Fernando Pessoa. His writing is haunted by borders, having recently appeared in Jacket2, The Capilano Review, & in the chapbook footnotes after Lorca (above/ground press, 2024).
Co-op Agenda is wheelchair accessible and has all-gender washrooms. We ask that attendees mask when they’re not eating or drinking. We will have air purifiers on site. There will be a lot of seating and an intermission. More detailed accessibility info coming soon.