Michael Lista, author of poetry collection Barfly (June 6, 2024) will be at the Calgary Wordfest’s Imaginairium Festival’s event, “Rocking the Boat.” Michael will join authors Catherine Hernandez and Danny Ramadan for a conversation hosted by Zain Velji about what it costs—professionally and personally—when you decide to make waves. Art cannot be separated from human rights, facts, and social justice. These writers have stood unwavering in their convictions and desires to create a more equitable, transparent, and empathetic world, often placing themselves in opposition to the status quo, whether literary, political, or societal. Books will be made available for sale and signing by Owl’s Nest Books.
The event will take place on Saturday, October 19 at 1PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab Barfly here!
A CBC Books’ Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title
We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.
In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.
Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the National Post and as the poetry editor of The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough; Strike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of longform journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus, Canadaland, and Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean’s. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.
