Vancouver launch of The Sacred Heart Motel
November 14 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Free
“One of the sheer brilliances of Kwan’s book is turning migration into a love poem and love into a migration. Don’t even try to separate the political from the personal; there are too many transient rooms in the heart, unregistered hearts in any given room. And, of course, there’s the border – of desire, home, identity – where all the action happens: ‘the convergence of lives, motivations / riding shotgun,’ as Kwan puts it, or rather wrenches it from our very hearts.”
—Carlos A. Pittella, recipient of a Frontier 2022 Global Poetry Prize
Join Grace Kwan for their hometown launch of THE SACRED HEART MOTEL, hosted at the City Centre Artist Lodge (Well Studios) in Mount Pleasant.
Food! Drinks! Readings! Heart-shaped key chains! Special guest reader to be revealed soon.
This is a free event. We regret that the venue is not wheelchair accessible.
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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/.