04/07/2026
April is Poetry Month and on April 10, The Public is delighted to partner with CMU Press and host esteemed poets, Patrick Friesen and Eve Joseph for an evening of readings as they each launch new books of poetry.
"The poems in Patrick Friesen’s latest collection, Sightings, move between the visible and invisible, between the contradictions of human history and the immediacy of a complex present. Friesen examines memory and music, rivers and personalities, open to all possibilities and sceptical of wisdom. Instead, these poems rely on the kind of knowledge that comes from experience: tremors and fragments riding on the movement of thinking. The distance from Friesen’s first book, published fifty years ago, to this one, speaks to what it means to have known the world through poetry.
"Patrick Friesen is the author of nearly twenty collections of poetry, including the influential The Shunning. Winner of a ReLit Award and Manitoba Book of the Year award, he has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s award and Griffin Poety Prize. Born in Manitoba, he now lives on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations in Victoria, British Columbia."
"In Eve Joseph's latest book, the poet is occupied with the idea of poetic imagination and how that often elusive thing can transform the mundane into the mysterious. In a book where fish are classified as bees and rivers are legally people, things are not always as they seem. As the title suggests, sometimes the act of taking something apart and building again from scratch allows a poem to find its true form.
"Eve Joseph lives and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. Her first two books of poetry, The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things, were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize."
