LitFest: Showcase: Books with Buzz(Kill) Cabaret

DATE :

Events Literary arts Edmonton

DEADLINE: October 18, 2025 - 11:05 pm

Join us and discover some of this year’s most buzzed about books in this not-to-be-missed showcase!

Featuring: Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Amber Dawn, and Canisia Lubrin
Host: Kate Gibson

When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 7 to 8:30 pm
Where: Citadel Theatre (Zeidler Hall), 9828 - 101A Ave, Edmonton
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)

Stock, by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic.

From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.

Buzzkill Clamshell, by Amber Dawn

Amber Dawn’s latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby – gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer – not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.

The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, by Canisia Lubrin

“How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.”—Dionne Brand

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior, and inexpressible.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/