Dubbed Canada’s coolest poet, Priscila Uppal will read from her latest poetry collections today as part of the Canada: Like You’ve Never Heard It Before speakers series.
“Health Poetry: Priscila Uppal’s Traumatology and Winter Sport: Poems” will take place today, from 4:30 to 6:30pm at 010 Vanier Senior Common Room, Vanier College, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Uppal’s most recent collections examine notions of health – body, mind, spirit – in unconventional and exciting ways. The world of Traumatology (Exile Editions, 2010) is populated by dubious health authorities as the poet attempts to achieve some sort of working relationship with the various parts of her psyche and physiognomy, and against her mortality.
Right: Priscila Uppal
Winter Sport: Poems (Mansfield Press, 2010) is a collection of poems this York English professor wrote as the first Canadian Athletes Now Fund poet-in-residence during the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and Paralympic Games. Here Uppal celebrates the beauty of winter sports, along with the athletes, sport vocabulary and the spectacle of the human body and spirit attempting the impossible.
The Canada: Like You’ve Never Heard It Before speakers series, featuring public lectures by prominent York Canadianists, is presented by theCanadian Studies Program and the Students for Canadian Studies Club. An interdisciplinary series, it promotes undergraduate research and study of Canada.
Uppal has eight previous collections of poetry, including Ontological Necessities, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two novels, The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2008). Recently, she edited the first-of-its-kind anthology The Exile Book of Canadian Sports Stories (2009).
This series is co-sponsored by Vanier College, Winters College, New College, Stong College, Calumet College, Founders College and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.