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Book Launch of Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena
October 16, 2015 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Free“These poems are both songs of joy for the beauty of a river, and prayers for its well being and the well being of all those who dwell within its drainage. The Skeena, the ‘river of mists,’ has its muse in Sarah deLeeuw. This collection is her gift to all of us who know and love a river known to the Tsimshian people as ‘Xsan, the ‘waters that flow from the clouds.’”
–Wade Davis
An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia’s second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, SKEENA is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river’s perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than eighty pages, this second collection of poetry by award-winning poet Sarah de Leeuw follows a Canadian tradition of long poems, weaving together poetic rendering of the river’s perceptions with archival material that includes highway signs and historical newspapers, scientific reports and local lore, geological surveys and topographic maps.
Sarah de Leeuw is the winner of the 2013 Dorothy Livesay Award for poetry and a two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction, and in 2014 won a Western Magazine Gold Award for the best article published that year in British Columbia. With a Ph.D. in geography, de Leeuw works in a faculty of medicine where she teaches and undertakes research on medical humanities and health inequalities.
CBC Books has included SKEENA in their 10 “hottest Canadian poetry collections” coming out this fall: http://www.cbc.ca/books/
The FREE event will be a collaboration with Skeena Wild, the Terrace Public Library, and Heritage Park Museum. The launch takes place in the Dance Hall at Heritage Park Museum.
Book sales by Misty River Books.