Aaron Kreuter and Sanna Wani join Ottawa's Nduka Otiono to present new works of poetry, hosted by Arc Poetry Magazine and Octopus Books.
In Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Aaron Kreuter asks the hard questions: will the Anthropocene have a laugh track? Is it the end . . . of Earth? Of capitalism? Of television? Shifting Baseline Syndrome is both searching and searing, veering between satire and sincerity, history and prophecy, and human and non-human worlds. As these clash ecstatically with loathing—and with the end looming—Kreuter demonstrates why we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: hoping, for once, that the series finale will be good.
Aaron Kreuter is the author of the short story collection You and Me, Belonging (2018) and the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs (2016). Kreuter lives in Toronto and is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is his second book of poems.
DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiquing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics.
Nduka Otiono is a writer, Associate Professor, and Graduate Program Coordinator at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University. He is the author and co-editor of nine books of creative writing and academic research. Prior to turning to academia, he was a journalist for fifteen years in Nigeria and served as the General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors. DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono is his latest book published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
In the poems of Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun, each verse is ode and elegy. The body is the page, time is a friend, and every voice, a soul. Sharply political and frequently magical, these often-intimate poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. From concrete to confessional, exegesis to erasure, the Missinnihe river in Canada to the Zabarwan mountains in Kashmir, My Grief, the Sun undoes genre, listens carefully to the planet’s breathing, addresses an endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.
Sanna Wani lives by the Missinnihe river. My Grief, the Sun is her first collection of poetry. She loves daisies.
