Please join us for an evening of readings by Christine Walde and Adèle Barclay.

Walde will present her limited edition artist multiple Bride Machine, composed of 14 folios of poetry with original artwork in a custom-made clamshell box. Bride Machine is inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as the Large Glass. Composed of single broadsides, transparencies, chapbooks, and other printed works, each folio is both a disruption and meditation on the act of reading, challenging readers’ assumptions about the codex and the ephemeral nature of the archive through the counter-narrative of its hinged, folded, coiled, bound, and stapled elements. Part amuse-bouche, part observation, Bride Machine is also a rigorous interrogation of desire, the fourth dimension, conceptual poetics, and the emancipation of Duchamp’s Bride from her apotheosis of virginity.

Barclay’s Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate, these poems are both abject and sweet as they repurpose loss into life and test the bounds of how much a poem can hold.

Christine Walde is a writer, artist, and librarian whose work combines library and archival research with interests in experimental prose, poetry, visual poetry, performance, and the visual arts. Her work has been published in print and online journals in Canada, the US, and the UK, including Carousel, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Lemonhound, The Malahat Review, Paratext, Plath Profiles, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. She has published two chapbooks: The Black Car (2011), based on her research working with Sylvia Plath's archives; and Noise and Silence (2013) with Poetry is Dead. In 2018, flask publishing produced Bride Machine. She has written two novels: The Candy Darlings, and Burning From the Inside, which was shortlisted for the 2014 ReLit Award. She is a former member of the Poetry Board of The Malahat Review and is represented by the Rights Factory. She lives in Victoria, BC.

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch, Fog Machine, The Puritan, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You,(Nightwood, 2016) was nominated for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection of poetry, Renaissance Normcore, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in fall 2019. She was the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque, a poetry ambassador for Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, and the 2017 Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts. She is Arc Magazine‘s Poet in Residence and an editor at Rahila’s Ghost Press. She lives on unceded Coast Salish territory/Vancouver, BC.

READ Books is situated on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.