Nick Thran & Laurence Hutchman Book Showcase

Nick Thran’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Nick lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller. In his fourth collection, Existing Music, Nick Thran blends praxis, experience and imagination together to make poems about breathing and singing, Potato World and the metaverse, translation and paying homage. Riffs, celebrations, collaborations, distortions and meditations—these poems explore the companionship of wistful music. Existing Music lingers in the euphonic— whether intentional, unexpected, or beneath layers of silence. Laurence Hutchman grew up in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Université de Montreal and was an English Literature professor at the Université de Moncton for 23 years. Hutchman has published 13 books of poetry, co-edited the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, and edited two volumes of In the Writers’ Words. Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2020 gathers together five decades of poetry by this accomplished Canadian poet. He invites us on a poetic odyssey, beginning with his travels to Europe, eventful times in Montreal, residence in New Brunswick, and finally, his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time. Poetic Appetizer From “Lines Written on a Terrace” excerpt from Laurence Hutchman's book Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems: 1968-2020 If you want to practice poems, put the spoon into your mouth. Feel your lips around it, sounds, shapes, textures, flavours. Feel how it nourishes you with its meats, vegetables, and fruit, how it takes them from the earth into you.