Personal Dissections with Steffi Tad-y & Kevin Andrew Heslop

On Wednesday, November 9 at 6pm, join Massy Arts Society, Massy Books and Gordon Hill Press for two debut poetry collections: From The Shoreline by Steffi Tad-y and the correct fury of your why is a mountain by Kevin Andrew Heslop. These personal dissections offer an intimate look into self performance of circumstance: survivalism in a diasporic world; curating the body for the theatre; navigating a neurotypical world. The two are joined by guest reader, Shaun Robinson.

Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance.

Purchase at Massy Books:

From The Shoreline by Steffi Tad-y 

the correct fury of your why is a mountain by Kevin Andrew Heslop

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance. Masks are mandatory. The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Covid Protocols: Attendees must wear a mask (N95 masks are encouraged and recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

The Books

From The Shoreline is Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection, bringing forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y’s world, her poetry takes its own advice in “Writer’s Archive”: “Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things.”

the correct fury of your why is a mountain by Kevin Andrew Heslop has been described by poet-editor Jim Johnstone as among “the most promising poetic projects to come out of Canada in recent years.” “Read with admiration” by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, this debut collection communicates Heslop’s sense of balance as a visual artist, curator, and poet who weights the page with visual harmony. By turns experiment, lyric, and incantation, the book nods to its author’s training as an actor, combining a command of language, form, character, and polyphony to make something performatively unique.

The Authors

Steffi Tad-y is a poet & writer from Manila. She is the author of two chapbooks, I Did Not Want to Be Read from Frog Hollow Press (2019) and Merienda from Rahila’s Ghost Press (2021). Her first full-length book of poems From the Shoreline was published by Gordon Hill Press in Spring 2022.

Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992) is the author of contiguous (The Blasted Tree), there is no minor violence just as there is no negligible cough during an aria (Frog Hollow Press), Human Beings Have Met to Suture the Wounds the Railroads Have Made Across This Country (Anstruther Press), the correct fury of your why is a mountain (Gordon Hill Press), and the forthcoming everything sfumato (Knife | Fork | Book). A neurodivergent, polydisciplinary doofus of Scottish, English, and Danish descent, presently lapsing Buddhist, Kevin also works in film, theatre, and visual art, dividing his practice between London, Ontario and Montréal, Québec.

The Guest Reader

Shaun Robinson’s poetry has appeared in the Puritan, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Poetry Is Dead, and the Rusty Toque, and received Honourable Mention in ARC Magazine’s 2018 Poem of the Year contest. Born in 100 Mile House, BC, Robinson has lived in Vancouver since 2006. He studied in UBC’s Creative Writing MFA program, where he served as the poetry editor of PRISM international. He is also the author of the chapbook Manmade Clouds and currently works as an editor for the chapbook press Rahila’s Ghost. If You Discover a Fire is his debut collection

Donating to Massy Arts Society

Have you noticed our by donation ticket option? Massy Arts Society is primarily funded by Massy Books, an Indigenous woman-owned and operated bookstore on the unceded territories of XwMuthkwium (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. To date we haven’t received any operating funds from any grants and are now providing the option for folks to contribute to keeping our events accessible and doors open. All proceeds from your donation will go towards operation costs of our community hub while we focus on supporting the practices of Indigenous and over-excluded artists. Consider donating when you register for your next event.