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On Writing Rooms
I wrote about writing Rooms over at Kathryn Mockler’s Send My Love To Anyone. Read the post here!
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Event: Calgary Launch of Rooms
Shelf Life is hosting a Virtual Launch. I’m looking forward to talking to Kyle Flemmer, a former Concordia student. Register! https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwvc-CpqzsrG9OavwUn9dg7a2Rqkvm1XDgB
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On Plath’s Lady Lazarus & I am No Lady, Lazarus
You’ll find my essay on working with Plath’s Ariel, here in particular the poem “Lady Lazarus” which among other things, I ran through a randomizer to create my version. Full essay over on LitHub and excerpted from “Sina Queyras on Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’” from The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems…
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Coming May 31st
From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they’d turned in an essay on…
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Introducing Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader
It’s my pleasure to announce the publication of this lovingly compiled and edited Nicole Brossard Reader from Coach House Books. I worked closely with Genevieve and Erin, but Alana Wilcox is the true Brossard champion and deserves so much applause and praise for the work she has done to bring vital feminist experimental voices–such as…
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And Now Coordinator
I’m excited to serve as Coordinator of Concordia’s Creative Writing Program for the 2020-21 academic year. My writing and teaching have long reflected my interest in innovative texts and dynamic, embodied, and sustainable writing practices. My recent book, My Ariel, interrogates gendered power dynamics in literary circles and their impact on creative women’s lives, and my current SSHRC funded research creation…
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In Conversation with Myra Bloom
MB: I wanted to get you to talk about the book a little bit in the context of lyric conceptualism. In “Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress,” you wrote, “The Lyric Conceptualist is not necessarily a feminine body but it has the stink of the impure, a certain irreverence for the master and therefore it…
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Ongoing Mentorship
I will be on sabbatical as of January 2022 & unable to take on any new students until January 2023. I’ll attach an email subscription very soon–I would like to have a sense of how many people will come. This list will also be used to update you on the next sessions and also send…
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Course Descriptions 2019-2020
People have been asking me what I am teaching next year–here are the course descriptions. These are slightly different than what was posted in the actual calendar. Over the next year or two themes of discussion will include Literary Identities, how we see ourselves and our relationships to institutions and communities. Strategies of creative resistances…
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Expressway Book Trailer
I’ve been finding all sorts of documents and random files as I try to rebuild my own files after a series of technical mishaps that may or may not have had anything to do with having twins a month before taking over directorship of Writers Read, publishing my first novel, and dealing with the ongoing…
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On TeethMarks
Well, at least I am on point. I believe I did this interview around 2007. It concerns my second book, TeethMarks, published in 2004. The interview finally appeared in print in 2014. I just found this email in my trash. Why it seemed to drift to the top of my trash this week I have…
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Merci Room of One’s Own
I published my first (or second…) poem in Room Of Own’s Own some…omg…some…thirty years ago? Is that possible? Must be. I was chuffed then and I’m chuffed now with this review from Adele Barclay. Thanks Room, thanks, Adele, thanks to all who have read and read poetry and respond.
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The Next Chapter
In a marvel of editing, the CBC posted a little over three minutes on the process of writing My Ariel. This content is at least six months old. 2018 was a difficult year and I have not been able to adequately respond to anything publicly. I’m very aware. So I do appreciate the opportunity. Also…
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On my rewrite of Plath’s “Cut”
This was fun. Talking with Al Filreis and (the lovely and amazing) Anna Safford earlier this year…during one of the busiest weeks of my fall season, which is partly why my New Years Resolution is better self care along with more activism from the large to the small. I’ve put the original version of Plath’s…
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from The Endurance
ROLL CALL You who were not born in a boat. You who can not tread water. You who do not qualify for safe passage. You who are without a compass. You who cannot take the air between your hands and feel the ions of improbability. You who have not stepped out of the satin shadows.…
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Sylvia Plath’s Daddy
Of all the poems to rewrite, or respond to, “Daddy” remains the most difficult (for me at least). It is its own ecosystem; it captures the range of traumas available to a young woman circa 1963 and onward, both inside and outside the house, the body, history. It enacts the repetitions of gendered trauma and…
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My Ariel: Off Cuts
Big as My Ariel is there was a lot more that didn’t go in. I will post a few here over the next few weeks.
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Thanks, Lambda, Wave to David & AWP
Waving to my friend David Groff, who was the one to tell me Lemon Hound won the Lambda back in 2007, and is here again, just sending me this photo from AWP, as I was writing this post with the news that My Ariel is also up for a Lambda. I have been nominated a…
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Lists, Reviews & Gratitude
I have had reviews. I have had lists. I am unbelievably lucky. And, as I write this I am waiting to hear whether my sister’s pain meds have kicked in. She is in palliative care in Northern British Columbia. I went to see her in October, and it’s not likely I will get back to…
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On Engaging with Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
“Not long after I became a new mother of twins, campus sexual politics and accounts of sexual misconduct in the literary world arose ever closer in my sphere. I was angry on behalf of the many young women whose lives were affected – and by many of the responses around me. Then I became angry…
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Interview: MxT
Found this on the CBC. A radio interview from 2014 with the lovely & amazing Sonali Karnick. “Award-winning poet and professor Sina Queyras just published a pretty pink book about a dark topic. “MxT” deals with death and grief but in a lighter way with graphs and diagrams. 11:24. //www.cbc.ca/i/caffeine/syndicate/?mediaId=2443930554
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Poet’s House
New York, I’ll be reading from My Ariel October 24 at Poet’s House. Come out if you can. Would love to see you all!
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My Ariel
I caught the first copy of My Ariel as it slid off the glue machine a few weeks back. My son caught the second (see video below!). The book is alive and kicking–pub date is officially September 18th, which happens by chance to be my mother’s birthday. This is more relevant than I thought it…
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MxT wins ReLit
I can’t believe I didn’t post this–it was amazing news. I’m totally chuffed. Thanks to the judges, and to Kenneth J. Harvey for founding the prize. The company is stellar.
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Death & Co.
The latest from My Ariel is up. Thanks to Mark Bibbins at The Awl. The dead bell, the dead bell Every Christ a clap of bad behaviour, Ballsy as Blake, a birthmark Of meat, a red frill of privilege. Baby eaters all, a sweet girl In a white cage. Such a useful future Looming, the men…
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The Jailor
The latest poem from my new Plath manuscript is up at The Walrus. Thanks to Damian Rogers for choosing it. If they look familiar, they should be: they are re-visions, ghostings, confrontations, and responses to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. “The Jailor,” The Walrus “I am no Lady, Lazarus,” Rusty Toque “Little Fugue,” The Awl “Thalidomide,” “The Rabbit Catcher,” The Malahat Review “Couriers,” “Cut,”…
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New Poems Up
Several poems from My Ariel, my new manuscript, are up across the Internet. If they look familiar, they should be: they are re-visions, ghostings, confrontations, and responses to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. I’ll be writing more about the project (like why on earth, and are you insane?), but not until next summer, when I have some time to…
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MxT reviewed over at Poetry
MxT generates its force through the perpetual denial of this promise. Over and over, the poems present a detached and clinical façade, only to have it break down or prove useless. For example, “A Manual for Remembering” instructs the reader on ways to encounter memory while remaining safe and insulated: “When remembering it is best…
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Sunday Poem: For Coach House
I feel the need to go back to the moment before I created Lemon Hound, the blog, which means, going back to the time of writing Lemon Hound, the book, a process that made me aware of my more vocal alter ego. Here she is, lounging confidently in an open window, on a bridge, in…
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Montreal: Writers’ Paradise
“The scene is increasingly diverse,” observed Queyras, director of Writers Read, a Concordia University series that invites established and emerging writers from Canada and abroad to give public readings as well as master’s classes. “There are more readings at bookstores like Drawn & Quarterly and Argo, and at galleries like VAV and Phi Centre. There…
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April Readings
I’m on the move in April. Hope to see you at one of these events. BROOKLYN April 14th, 7pm Brooklyn Public Library with Tonya Foster & Erica Hunt 10 Grand Army Plz,Brooklyn Belladonna* Collaborative YALE April 16th 8pm The Graduate Poetry Reading Series: Yale Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), LC 319 63 High St. New Haven, CT…
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Reviews, Reviews, Reviews
I am rich in reviews and so thankful for the close reading! The Bullcalf, Arc Magazine and The Kenyon Review. Ben Purkert makes a case for the elegy as selfie. Not what I intended, but he makes a compelling case. Not all elegies, however, are necessarily selfless. Some are self-addressed. Sina Queyras’s M x T…
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Elska mína
Originally posted on NewPoetry: Sina Queyras ? You created me, you should remember me; leaned your face into the canto of …..my birth and broke air with me, breathed your best, your unrest Into me even as you bled, and my father—a taut shock of muscle—caught me …..as an Eagle takes a trout. It was…
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Fall Dates: Montreal, Vancouver & Toronto
Montreal: Atwater Library Friday, October 17: Sina Queyras and Ken Babstock Vancouver Writers Festival Friday, October 24, Waterfront Theatre, 10:00AM, Pure Poetry Kris Demeanor, Eve Joseph, Anne Kennedy, Christopher Levenson, Sina Queyras, Katherena Vermette Saturday, October 25 Performance Works, 8:00PM Poetry Bash: Ken Babstock,George Elliott Clarke, Billeh Nickerson, Sina Queyras, Katherena Vermette, Patricia Young Sunday, October 26 Waterfront Theatre, 1:30PM The Al Purdy Show:…
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Twitter Reviews of MxT
Kathryn Mockler @themockler Jul 24 Just finished MxT by Sina Queyras @lemonhound So good! Make sure you read this book! Stephen Burt @accommodatingly · Jul 7 @sinaqueyras @coachhousebooks MxT! It’s passionately supergood, circuit diagrams & all. Hope to say so elsewhere soon. Adam Dickinson @AdamwDickinson Sina Queyras’s MxT is an ambitious and fully-realized work.…
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MRB on MxT
Thanks to Bert Almon for the love. The great strength of the book is not in the apparatus – circuit diagrams, tutelary figures – but in the texture. Queyras employs many forms: prose poems, poems in stanzas, representations of postcards, aphorisms (“All mature poets understand the need for dry wood chips”), found poems, concrete poetry. The tour…
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Rain Taxi on MxT
While Queyras acknowledges the limitations of elegiac poetry, she also recognizes its power as a means of communing with the dead. For all its scientific apparatus, M x T is a book of deep feeling. Coming in the summer issue. Thanks so much.
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Malahat Review on MxT
Thanks to Paul Franz for this astute review: The title M×T derives from what Queyras calls “Ohm’s Law of Grieving” (“Feeling = Memory × Time”), one of nine fanciful formulas and mechanical models for representing grief. Crucially, Queyras presents her ambivalence—between the self-contained electric circuit and oceanic openness—as a real one. Her notion of a…
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Globe & Mail on MxT
Globe & Mail, April 25th, The lush vehemence of Sina Queyras’s new poetry collection M x T is as in-your-face as its crazy-pink cover. These poems issue the high-voltage lyric force of mourning songs while bracing themselves against our shuddering in response. Each text is an analogue of how grief convulses through us but –…
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Talking with Mark Medley
May 6, 2014 7:00 AM ET More from Mark Medley | @itsmarkmedley Peter J. Thompson/National Post It should come as no surprise that Queyras is critical of her own work, considering that, despite her insistence that she’s “not really a critic,” she has evolved into one of the country’s loudest critical voices, with a platform…
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Shannon Webb-Campbell on MxT
MxT by Sina Queyras By Shannon Webb-Campbell Telegraph-Journal April 25 2014 Nothing is large enough to hold grief. Even language fails to contain it. Sina Queyras proposes a formula for grieving in her latest collection MxT, or Memory x Time, what could be this year’s most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection. Known as Lemon…
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Thanks Publishers Weekly
‘Poetry succeeds where science fails to measure grief in this brilliant new collection by the esteemed Queyras.’ –Publishers Weekly, Spring Round Up, January 24, 2014
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Day 4, Meditations in an Emergency
www.instagram.com/p/B9y5kBVgKuw/ Day 4 It was a lot of effort to get this light in our house, and to have my desk in this position to receive it. I’m grateful for every moment of it. Pups are having breakfast in bed. Homeschooling will being at 9. I was reading a piece in the New York Times…
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In Conversation
Tonight Sue Goyette, Larissa Lai and Sue Sinclair will read followed by a conversation.