Manitoba Writers Guild
Artspace
Join Spenser Smith in launching his poetry collection A Brief Relief From Hunger.
The Manitoba Writers’ Guild is pleased to present the spring 2024 series of our Book Launch program for Guild members with a poetry collection by Spenser Smith, featuring guest readers Sara Ens and Hannah Green.
Sunday, April 14, 2024
2:00 to 3:30 PM
Artspace Boardroom
100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, MB
Refreshments will be served.
Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event. $20.00 per copy; cash.
Please note that attendees will be required to wear face masks for this event.
Launches are a great opportunity to meet your artistic colleagues. We hope many Guild members and other Manitoban authors will support their fellow writers by coming to one or more of these launches. Bring your friends and family. Launches are open to the public.
Content warning: The Guild is sensitive to the fact that members of a launch audience will respond differently to literary material. The Guild provides a comfortable “safe place” in the lounge, with water and refreshments, for any person or persons upset by anything read or said for all book launches.
About Spenser Smith’s
A Brief Relief from Hunger
(Gordon Hill Press)
ISBN 978-1-7742-2098-6
A brief relief from hunger is a poetry collection about the yearnings of a young man—cocaine, human connection, fast food—and the ravenous world in which he lives. In Vancouver, the speaker binges Big Macs post-rehab while others consume fentanyl-tainted drugs. Growling bodies are everywhere, including on Facebook where people post cruel comments about drug users in the face of British Columbia’s toxic drug supply crisis. At the heart of the collection are poems that respond to these comments from the perspective of the speaker, now sober but still hungry, whose friends are dying from the contaminated drug supply. The speaker knows at least one reliable source of contentment: Grandma’s kitchen, where, at his lowest points, he finds cabbage rolls, acceptance, and a tenderness he wishes to absorb into his masculinity.
Spenser Smith
Spenser Smith is a Regina-born poet, essayist, and photographer who recently moved to Winnipeg after 10 years in B.C. His debut book of poetry, A brief relief from hunger, was published by Gordon Hill Press in 2023.
His writing also appears in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, The Capilano Review, Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, subTerrain, The Puritan, and SAD Mag. He holds a BA in creative writing and journalism from Vancouver Island University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.
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