Sylvia Legris and Chuqiao Yang will be launching their new collections The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions Publishing) and The Last to the Party (Goose Lane Editions) at McNally Robinson Saskatoon.

This event will be hosted in person in the Travel Alcove.

“Nature converges with words” in Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic poetry collection The Principle of Rapid Peering. The title borrows a phrase from the 19th-century field biologist Joseph Grinnell that describes the feeding behavior of certain birds that subsist in a continuous mode of “rapid peering,” Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through seasonal poems that form a kind of almanac or naturalist’s notebook in poetry. On long walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, moths appear, as do birds, plants, and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic in the background.

Sylvia Legris’ poetry collection Garden Physic (Granta Books 2022; New Directions 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK, and was chosen as one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by both The Times (UK) and by CBC Books. Her other collections include The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatical Antiphonal, and Nerve Squall, which was the winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and The Pat Lowther Award.

In The Last to the Party, Chuqiao Yang’s highly anticipated and deeply moving debut, Yang explores family, culture, diaspora, and the self’s tectonic shifts over time. Yang’s poems journey restlessly through recollections of a Saskatchewan childhood, trips to visit family in Taiyuan, and a sojourn across the American South in search of the moments and places where one became a stranger to oneself. “You are a mouse in the backcountry of your memories,” writes Yang, “You are a fox in winter, devouring well-meaning friends.” Irreverent, fierce, and ceaselessly surprising, The Last to the Party marks the arrival of a unique voice and an unsparing poetic vision.

Chuqiao Yang was born in Beijing, raised in Saskatoon, and now lives in Ottawa. Her writing has appeared in several journals, including the New Quarterly, CV2, Arc, PRISM, and the Walrus (forthcoming) and on the CBC radio. Yang was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and her debut chapbook, Reunions in the Year of the Sheep won the bpNichol Chapbook Award. The Last to the Party is her first full-length poetry collection.