Laura Broadbent – Writers Read: Concordia university's reading Series

Writers Read and Concordia University welcome Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent tonight at 7pm, in the York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Readers first shook hands with Laura Broadbent through the pages of her remarkable, and strikingly titled book, Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? (Snare Books, 2012). Most notable are the sections entitled “Between A And B,” and “Men in Various States.” The former is a suite of poems that tangentially weaves lines of grit, glass, bodies, sex, and sky. Each poem presents as inky layers of interior perspectives bookended between A. and B., two physical, chronological, and metaphorical touchstones. The latter, another suite of poems, reads as the unspoken confessionals of various male voices — work that brims with an honesty of crude desire and psychological strife. There is a magic in Broadbent’s words and ‘terrestriality’ in her approach, if such a word can be coined, as if locating a ley line meant digging through not just bodies, but the hell of what people mean within and between, what makes a self. Broadbent might contest this interpretation through her invention of Jean Rhys’ voice in Interviews (Metatron 2014): “If I was bound for hell, / let it be hell. / No more false heavens. / No more damned magic.” But reading Broadbent’s work is tantamount to incantation because it summons something palpable, dark, and lurking. The trick of her magic is this: Her work digs deep until it connects to a Hell that was bound for us.

Broadbent’s voice most recently resonates with the publication of In on the Great Joke (Coach House Books, 2016).

Arrive early on campus to hear volunteers read the entirety of Lisa Robertson’s, Debbie: An Epic, throughout Concordia University’s LB building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd W) from 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm.

Poem from “Between A And B” in Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining?:

Even your family can betray you but when there is no you your
family can’t betray you. The place between A and B formally re-
quests you to drop the story. He is not better than you because there
is no you and you have not failed because there is no you. You
did not say the wrong thing because there is no you. There was no
humiliating sexual encounter because there is no you. You didn’t
detect bodily decay because there is no you. He cannot hurt you
because there is no you. You aren’t stuck in your first-world issues
because there is no you. Your task is to walk among the ten thou-
sand things – look at the sky and become it smell the morning
and become it feel the temperature and become it scatter with
the wind. Not a name reaches you in your bassinet of nothing-
ness strung between A and B.

– Johnathan F. Clark

On Friday October 21st, Writers Read in collaboration with Off The Page presents a live performance of Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic (New Star 1997) in the afternoon before we gather for an evening with Lisa Robertson herself and Laura Broadbent.

Debbie: A Live Reading, Performance, Marathon

October 21st, 2pm, English Department, LB 671.05, 1400 de Maisonneuve

Call it a cover or a choral reading, call it a performance, a collaboration, or a marathon: it begins with a party scene in an English Department. We will gather to read Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic out loud from cover to cover. The readers will move around the English department and through the book with the audience.

An Evening with Lisa Robertson & Laura Broadbent

October 21st, 7pm, York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Both with new releases from Coach House, Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent will join us at Concordia University on the evening of Friday October 21st. Two writers inhabiting many voices, 49th Shelf describes Robertson’s 3 Summers as “a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests.” Of Broadbent’s collection, In On The Great Joke, Rob McLennan notes “there is something reminiscent in In on the Great Joke of the work of Anne Carson, as Broadbent utilizes the frame of poetry to write her way around and through theory, prose-blocks and conceptual bursts.”

Writers Read is one of a long tradition of diverse literary reading series at Concordia University and has recently hosted such authors as Mary Ruefle, Ben Lerner, Dionne Brand, and Roxane Gay. Writers read is supported by the Faculty of Arts & Science at Concordia University and the English Department.