Susan Rudy and Shelly Harder come together to launch new chapbooks from Ottawa’s above/ground press. 

Rudy’s Consequences gathers a thousand sentences — from feminist theorists, queer poets, songs, private conversations, and decades of notebooks — stripping them of hierarchy and ownership, letting Brossard and Bronski Beat and Butler sit side by side, voices refracting across queer and trans thought, motherhood, desire, and the ongoing problem of telling the truth about a body. 

Harder’s pinion begins in the 2020 lockdowns. Alternating between narrative and lyric, this collection explores isolation, fragility, and interconnection with humour and yearning.

Both books know that language was not built for us, and both find forms that work anyway. This evening brings their authors into conversation about writing queerly, playing at the edges of genre and gender, and what it means to claim a word that began in someone else’s mouth.