Launching Poets in Response to Peril: Canadian Poets on Behalf of Ukraine
May 28, 2 pm Blackfriars Bistro 46 Blackfriars St., London
London, ON (May 2022) –All welcome! Canadian poets Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski have co-edited Poets in Response to Peril, a major anthology which brings together 61 poems by 48 of Canada’s most prominent poets in response to the current crisis in Ukraine and other perils afflicting our troubled times. Profits from the book will be directed toward PEN Ukraine’s efforts to provide the Ukrainian cultural community with evacuation and resettlement help.
Several contributors will read their poems at the launch. In this anthology, luminaries like Gary Barwin, George Elliott Clarke, Tanis MacDonald, Daphne Marlatt, and Goran Simić offer us passionate, often heartbreaking, poems invoking sunflowers and broken earth; intimacy and grief; falling bombs and the fragility of flesh; AK-47s and a bride’s bouquet. Gathering voices in the white heat of the moment, this anthology couldn’t be more timely or more necessary.
The book is part of a larger project, Poets in Response to Peril, which included a 3-hour international Zoom reading featuring over 30 of the book’s contributors, and which will continue in an ongoing playlist of videos submitted by Canadian poets expressing solidarity with those afflicted by war (YouTube > Poets in Response to Peril). See www.pennkemp.wordpress.com.
Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine, edited by Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski. (Pendas Productions/Laughing Raven Press, 2022, 121 pages)
ISBN 978-1-927734-37-7
The book is available for distribution. Cost: $25 at the launch. Thereafter, $30 plus postage.
For orders, please contact Richard-Yves Sitoski at r_sitoski@yahoo.ca
