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IAS Book Launch: Into the Continent

20 May 2024, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Book Cover and Author portrait

Join us for the launch of Emily McGiffin's new book of poetry, Into the Continent.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All | UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

IAS Common Ground
G11, ground floor, South Wing
UCL, Gower St, London
WC1E 6BT

Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself. 
 
my body an ark
carrying successors like a chambered nautilus
 
what i was placed here to do
ferry the unborn
across the inhospitable land
make a bed amid the thornbush
make a tea table, forge the domestic
bliss of my country
raise them as heirs
draw our lineage in the sand

For further impressions of Emily McGiffin's writing and her new book, read The First Page on the IAS online review Think Pieces here.

Into the Continent is published with the University of Regina Press: Into the Continent (uofrpress.ca).

 

 

About the Speaker

Emily McGiffin

Research Fellow at UCL SELCS

Emily McGiffin was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations. She’s the author of Between Dusk and Night, shortlisted for the CAA Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, Subduction Zone, winner of the ASLE Creative Book Award, and Of Land, Bones and Money, a book of literary criticism, and the winner of the 2008 RBC Bronwyn Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for poetry.