Chimeras Book Launch

Join Tegan Zimmerman in conversation with fellow Halifax poets Clare Goulet and Sue Goyette to discuss poetry and celebrate her new book!

Join us to celebrate the launch of Tegan Zimmerman's debut poetry book, in conversation with poets Sue Goyette and Clare Goulet!

Location - MSVU Library, MacDonald Room. 166 Bedford Highway, Halifax, B3M 2J6.

Accessibility details: Main entrance to Seton building offers elevator to 2nd floor, follow signs to EMF Library. Room offers accessible seating space.

Tegan Zimmerman (PhD) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia; her writing centralizes contemporary gender theory and women’s writing that focuses on the maternal and mother-daughter relations. She has two beloved Pugs named Kosmo and Canto.

Sue Goyette is a poet and educator living in Kjipuktuk. She is the author of ten collections of poetry and the novel Lures and was the Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality from 2020 to 2024. Awards include the Pat Lowther Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize as well as finalist for the Griffin; her work has been translated into French, Spanish, and German.

Clare Goulet’s recent work is Graphis scripta: writing lichen, shortlisted for the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award and the Raymond Souster Award, and Symbiotic, an outdoor installation at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts. Her work on lichen and metaphor has been presented and republished in Ireland and the UK. Co-editor of Lyric Ecology on Jan Zwicky, she lives in Halifax/Kjipuktuk, NS, where she teaches and directs the Writing Centre at MSVU.

"Chimeras is a collection of poems that are sky bound and on all fours pulling language through the temporal long haul of what it takes to arrive just on the brink of the not yet and the possible. Here’s matriarchal transformation in flux. And here’s how the past, present, and future merge to become like a body of water for private and public revelries and protests to do everything they can to not just stay afloat but to kick with the dignity it takes to swim. What is revelatory is how this poet’s language moves: up to its ears in dirt then gracing a green to the thinking it’s doing. And how its pace and the smoke it leaves in its wake suits exactly right now." - Sue Goyette, Halifax Poet Laureate 2020-2024

"Bracing itself against its own deft assembly of fragments of ancient and continental philosophy, pop culture and contemporary daily life, the 4 parts of the chimera that is this book construct something simultaneously lyrically shimmering and monstrous, deeply personal and mythic. Chimeras is oblique, searching, and spare and, in the end, incandescent in its grief. An astonishing debut." -Clare Goulet, author of Graphis scripta: writing lichen and director of the MSVU Writing Centre