Featuring: Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Amber Dawn, Canisia Lubrin, and Alex Manley
Host: Kate Gibson
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)

Stock, by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic.

From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.

Buzzkill Clamshell, by Amber Dawn

Amber Dawn’s latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby – gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer – not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.

The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, by Canisia Lubrin

“How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.”—Dionne Brand

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior, and inexpressible

Post-Man, by Alex Manley
In this divisive moment in the history of gender politics, Alex Manley navigates life as a neurodivergent non-binary person and explores their dislocations from the norm. Post-Man delves into the ways in which Manley has always felt apart, alone and othered—how they always felt there was something wrong with them. In adulthood they came to recognize that in addition to suffering from depression, anxiety, ADHD, and possibly more, they understood themselves as existing outside the neat binary of gender that modern society imposes on us.

With this understanding of themself, Manley takes readers through the stultifying machismo of hockey culture, the improbable job of working for a men’s website, the strange unpleasantness of going bald as a nonbinary person, and more. Heart-wrenching and profound, Post-Man is a book that will make you reconsider your own perceptions of gender and masculinity.

JENNIFER BOWERING DELISLE’s collection of lyric essays, Micrographia (2023) won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving, a collection of poetry (2021) and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir (2017). Her new collection of poetry, Stock, responds to stock imagery with a feminist lens. She is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.

AMBER DAWN (she/her) is a writer and creative facilitator living on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC). She is the author of several books, including two novels (Lambda Literary Award winner Sub Rosa and Sodom Road Exit) and three poetry collections (Where the words end and my body begins, My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems, and Buzzkill Clamshell), and the editor of three anthologies.

CANISIA LUBRIN’s work has been recognized with accolades including the Griffin Poetry Prize, Windham-Campbell Prize, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.

ALEX MANLEY (they/them) is a non-binary writer, editor, translator and poet from and living in Montreal/Tiohtia:ke. They are the author of We Are All Just Animals & Plants (Metatron Press) and The New Masculinity (ECW Press), as well as the English-language translator of Daphne B.’s Made-Up (Coach House Books). Their new book, Post-Man: Esays on Being a Neurodivergent Non-Binary Person (Arsenal Pulp Press) is out on September 30, 2025.

To reserve tickets to this event, please email our Ticket Coordinator, Cait Yaga at events@litfestalberta.org