Poetry Night / Gillian Jerome + Maleea Acker + Ella Adkins + Tom Green

On Friday, May 27 at 6pm, join Nightwood Editions and Massy Books for an evening of poetry reading, featuring Vancouver poet Gillian Jerome’s launch of her second book, Nevertheless, and Victoria poet Maleea Acker’s launch of her third book of poems, Hesitating Once to Feel Glory, with opening guest, poet Ella Adkins.

At the event, host Tom Green will add more zest to an already impressive lineup.

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

This event is free + open to all of our community, and registration is mandatory.

Covid Protocols: For all in-person events, attendees must provide proof of vaccination, wear a mask (N95 masks are encouraged and recommended as they offer the best protection), and consent to having their temperature checked at the front door. We ask that if you are showing any symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

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Books and Authors

Gillian Jerome is a mother, writer, teacher who lives on the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, land and water she is grateful for and responsible to. Her first book of poems, Red Nest (Nightwood Editions, 2009), was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and won the 2010 ReLit Award for Poetry. She co-edited an oral history project, Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008), which won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award. Recently her poems have appeared in Hunger Mountain, New Poetry and Geist. Having taught literature at UBC for two decades, she is turning her attention toward teaching language arts to Vancouver teenagers.

Nevertheless is a book of walking poems and odes. Poet Gillian Jerome roams into ordinary places inside and outside of the city of Vancouver to find beings and states of being to sing about. This collection is about love, grief, friendship, neighbours, neighbourhoods and aging, but its central question might be, “How do we restore relationships between land and people?” In response, Jerome’s poems suggest that we might plant a garden, put one foot in front of the other. “Look about you,” George Washington Carver wrote. “Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you.”

Maleea Acker lives in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territories on Vancouver Island. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Reflecting Pool (Pedlar Press, 2009) and Air-Proof Green (Pedlar Press, 2012), as well as a non-fiction book, Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star Books, 2012). She has lived, worked and been an arts fellow in Canada, the US, Spain and Mexico. Acker teaches geography, Canadian studies and literature at the University of Victoria and Camosun College.

Hesitating Once to Feel Glory, Maleea Acker’s dauntless new poetry collection is crafted with emotion and bold style. Acker’s poems hang on precipices of emotion. They cartwheel from sadness to glory, then break into blossoms in a drought-struck landscape of longing. These are poems filled with daring leaps and precise, deft metaphors. There is machinery, there are imaginaries; a dictator selects the musical soundtrack. The poems cajole and praise both the world and interior life with an erotic charge and enduring hope.

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