Duncan Mercredi Book Launch

Join Duncan Mercredi for the launch of his new poetry collection, Only the Scent of You Remained (At Bay Press). Co-presented with McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Duncan Mercredi was Winnipeg’s Poet Laureate in 2021. In this frank, raw, and honest collection the poet chases down the river of who he is. Each bend, each stone, every waterfall, a sharing of self. Then the writings can be rolled up and when the time comes, the time that he leaves the place he calls home, they will be placed on the sacred fire. To return to where they came from.

You are invited to walk with the author during intimate reflection and pause to remember the people who have been a part of his life and journey, the ones who influenced him, both good and bad. The paths taken, the roads travelled that led him to this city. As the wick burns the last of its wax we recognize its existence as the scent of smoke still remains long after the light goes out.

Host Rosanna Deerchild has been storytelling for more than twenty years, currently as host of CBC Radio One’s Unreserved, a show that shares Indigenous community, culture, and conversation. Rosanna has also developed and hosted This Place, a podcast series for CBC Books around the Indigenous anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold. Her debut poetry collection, this is a small northern town, won the 2009 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Her second book, calling down the sky (forthcoming in a tenth anniversary edition), is her mother’s Residential School survivor story. Her most recent collection, she falls again, was published in Fall of 2024. A Cree from O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation at South Indian Lake in northern Manitoba, Rosanna now lives and works in her found home of Winnipeg.

October 26, 2025, 2:00 PM

Admission: FREE

McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park, 1120 Grant Avenue