Thursday April 25, 7:00 pm
Grant Park in the Atrium | Facebook event | Streaming on YouTube
Hosted by Sarah Ens
Join Rhea Tregebov as she returns to Winnipeg to launch her new poetry collection, Talking to Strangers (Véhicule Press). A book signing will follow a reading and conversation hosted by Sarah Ens. Presented through the support of The League of Canadian Poets.
The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream.
Talking to Strangers is a book of bracing encounters. Throughout her four decades as poet, Rhea Tregebov has displayed an uncommon eye for the mysteries of ordinary life—moments where, as she writes, “[t]he simplest things / elude me.” This gift is brought to brilliant effect in her eighth book of poetry and most charged to date. In gorgeous arias of recollection and evocation, of elegy and heartbreak, Tregebov mourns, praises, prays, regrets, summons, celebrates, and bears witness with formidable artistry and tenderness (“You wouldn’t think the inanimate would get tired /but it does.”) Direct, never forced, keenly observant, and marked by scrupulous craft, these new poems unfold in beguiling, often breathtaking ways. They confirm Tregebov’s place among the most significant poets of her generation.
Rhea Tregebov is the acclaimed author of eight books of poetry and two novels, The Knife Sharpener’s Bell and Rue des Rosiers. Her work has received the J. I. Segal Award, the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. Retired from teaching at UBC, she now holds the position of Associate Professor Emerita and is the former Chair of The Writers Union of Canada. She lives in Vancouver.
Host Sarah Ens is a writer and editor based in Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, MB). She is the author of two books of poetry, both published by Turnstone Press and both shortlisted for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Her book Flyway won the ReLit Award in 2023. Sarah is the Manitoba and Saskatchewan representative for The Writers’ Union of Canada.
