Join author dennis cooley for the launch of his new poetry collection, body works (University of Calgary Press), a humorous, tender, irreverent, and meditative examination of the human body as it passes through time, and as it is celebrated and denied. The event will feature a reading and conversation with dee Hobsbawn-Smith, followed by a book signing.

The event will be hosted live in the Travel Alcove, and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. The video will remain available for viewing thereafter.  Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, in body works dennis cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

dennis cooley is a founding member and three times president of the Manitoba Writer’s Guild, founding editor with Turnstone Press and professor at St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba. He has lived his creative life on the prairies, where he has been a poet, publisher, teacher, critic, theorist, anthologist, reviewer, organizer, mentor.

dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s award-winning poetry, essays, and fiction is often influenced by her history as a chef, restaurateur, and Slow Food activist. She lives rurally west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Treaty Six Territory. Her eighth book, Bread & Water: Essays, published by University of Regina Press, 2021, won the 2022 Saskatchewan Book Awards Nonfiction Award and was a finalist for the City of Saskatoon Award. Bread & Water also won Taste Canada’s 2022 Gold Medal Book Award in the Culinary Narratives category. Her novel, Danceland Diary, came out in fall 2022, published by Radiant Press, and her new poetry collection, Among the Untamed, published by Frontenac House, will be released in the spring of 2023.