Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask and Things to Buy in New Brunswick. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted as a graphic novel, One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and currently resides in North Vancouver BC.
Synopsis
The Animal in the Room
Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history. Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body ― really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.
The Animal in the Room
Sessions in which Meghan Kemp-Gee participates
Thursday 25 April, 2024
Both of these collections embody the selves we see reflected in humanity and the natural world. From love and desire to environmental collapse and capitalism, we journey deep in the natural (dis)order of things with Jake Byrne and Meghan Kemp-Gee.
Friday 26 April, 2024
A novel about the unshakeable animosity between a brother and sister and a community increasingly divided as the feud spirals further into vendettas and violence each year. Through seasons of want and uncertainty, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart the reveals itself to be the most formidable adversary each person faces. A pitch-perfect evocation of a lost time and a shadowed mirror to our modern politics of grievance and retribution....