An Evening with Carol Harvey Steski

Join poet Carol Harvey Steski as she reads and signs her debut poetry collection rump + flank (NeWest Press). Featuring a conversation hosted by Ariel Gordon. Co-presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers as part of THIN AIR 2022.

The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream featuring live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Carol Harvey Steski’s tenacious and unapologetic debut, rump + flank, explores the body in nature’s many incarnations: human, animal, plant, microbe, even chemical. The result is a fantastical poetic work that sheds light on what bodies—especially female ones—endure, probing the full range of experiences from pleasure and hope to deep loss and trauma.

Carol Harvey Steski grew up under the wide Winnipeg sky. Her poems have been published in the anthology Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology and literary magazines including The Temz Review, CAROUSEL, FreeFall, untethered, Room, Prairie Fire and Contemporary Verse 2. She won FreeFall’s 2019 annual poetry contest and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. As a young-adult survivor of melanoma she has been a guest on CBC Radio-Manitoba speaking about the therapeutic benefits of writing through disease. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter, working in corporate communications.

Host Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Her most recent book is TreeTalk (At Bay Press), a public poetry project where Ariel hangs poems in trees and asks passersby to add their thoughts, ideas, and secrets. She is currently WIWF’s publicist.

rump + flank

– by Carol Harvey Steski

Carol Harvey Steski’s tenacious and unapologetic debut, rump + flank, explores the body in nature’s many incarnations: human, animal, plant, microbe, even chemical. The result is a fantastical poetic work that sheds light on what bodies–especially female ones–endure, probing the full range of experiences from pleasure and hope to deep loss and trauma.

These poems are piercingly humorous, sexy, and peppered with startling absurdities, but are grounded by an undercurrent of nostalgia (and a soupçon of feminist rage): mercury reproduces like funhouse mirrors, oysters are whole notes dropped into eternal song, cancer is a surly character taking and discarding lovers, a domestic chore turns dark as a mother channels her inner Lady Macbeth. Lush imagery melds with organic rhythms to spawn a visceral experience, a tendon-and-muscle-driven engine that readers can feel racing within their own bodies.