Book Launch with Courtney Bates-Hardy and Michael Trussler

Join us at the Artesian for the launch of Anatomical Venus by Courtney Bates-Hardy and Realia by Michael Trussler. The event will be hosted by the wonderful writer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist, Carla Harris.

✷ The event will begin shortly after 7pm and wrap up around 9pm.

✷ Free admission

The Artesian is located at 2627 13th Ave in Regina, SK. The Artesian is wheelchair accessible, all-ages, and a proud supporter of positive spaces initiatives with a zero-tolerance policy towards hate, harassment, and/or discrimination. The venue reserves the right to remove any patron creating an unsafe environment. The accessible entrance is available via a lift, please ask staff for help if necessary.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

✷ Courtney Bates-Hardy is the author of House of Mystery (ChiZine Publications, 2016) and a chapbook, Sea Foam (JackPine Press, 2013). Her poems have been published in Grain, Vallum, PRISM, and CAROUSEL, among others. She has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (Biblioasis) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is queer, neurodivergent, and disabled, and one-third of a writing group called The Pain Poets. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

✷ Michael Trussler lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. He writes poetry and creative non-fiction. His work has appeared in Canadian and American journals and has been included in domestic and international anthologies. A photographer, he has a keen interest in the visual arts and is neurodivergent. He teaches English at the University of Regina.

ABOUT THE HOST

✷ Carla Harris (they/she) is a disabled, mad queer enby writer, performer and interdisciplinary artist from Treaty 4 territory, living in Regina, Saskatchewan. They performed at the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan's Annual Poetry Soirée of 2022, the Verses Festival in Vancouver (2016), the Saskatoon Poetic Arts Festival (2018), and Regina Nuit Blanche (2017). They released their first chapbook, Obtain No Proof with Dis/Ability Series of Frog Hollow Press in 2020, and has had publications appear in Write Magazine (2023) The Humber Literary Review (2023), The Leslie Strutt Chapbook with League of Canadian Poets (2022) and The ANTILANG (2021). Harris teaches creative improvisation and is working on their first play and their first book of poetry in unconfined #CripTime. Learn more about Carla on their website: https://carlaharris.ca/

ABOUT THE BOOKS

✷ Anatomical Venus is a visceral collection of poems that invoke anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It’s a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th century morgues and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love. Available online at https://radiantpress.ca/shop/p/anatomicalvenus, your favourite local bookstore, library, or at the event.
“Anatomical Venus is an expansive look into the meteor of disability—into the ways in which our so carefully constructed worlds can shatter and come apart, both instantly and through the slow unfolding of months and years. Throughout each poem, Bates-Hardy maintains a delicate balance of grief and inquiry, making the body into something at once transitory and also eternal. The specific, compassionate language in this book does the ultimate work of creating a universal experience out of something so personal and raw—we are all this delicate, this worthy of grace. This is Bates-Hardy’s body, yes—but also, somehow, ours.”
— Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

✷ In Realia, Michael Trussler grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. These are poems requiring Jonah and Little Red Riding Hood to change places if we are to measure diagnostically homeless oceans, surveillance capitalism, and the vulnerable human body. Including a mini-essay on the author’s OCD and another on how a Caspar David Friedrich painting is an uncanny neighbour to ourselves, Realia is fluent in mitochondrial psychology and the diaries of Katherine Mansfield. It also offers lessons in extinct Barbie Doll arrangement. Available online at https://radiantpress.ca/shop/p/realia, your favourite local bookstore, library, or at the event.
“Ping-ponging back and forth between interpretive prose and a poetic voice that is helpful, informative and shaken, Michael Trussler takes in the rubble of now. His book is a Lyrical Ballads manifesto for the anti-sublime (machines that learn, Gaboxadol hallucinations). Every thing is not a thing but “vibrant matter” and not particularly kind but more or less loyal to “juddering” humans, or so we like to think. The frightening are everywhere. And then the reader comes upon the extraordinary poetic essay for Katherine Mansfield. Realia is fierce and tender.”
— Tim Lilburn, author of Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change See less