Poetry Soirée & Double Book Launch with Garth Martens and Sadiqa de Meijer

Celebrate poetry and two new books by Garth Martens and Sadiqa de Meijer at the Morrin Centre, followed by an open mic. Join us for a special evening to celebrate the Quebec City launch of two poetry books: Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens and Qaf's People by Sadiqa de Meijer. A discussion with the poets and an open mic will follow. Copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event. If you arrive after the start of the event, please ring the doorbell. For any questions, contact us at [email protected] Québec City, Québec — Morrin Centre Poetry Soirée Oct. 19, 2026 Monday, 7–9 p.m. Morrin Centre 44 Chau. des Écossais, Québec City, QC G1R 4H3 Featuring: Garth Martens (Victoria, BC), and Sadiqa de Meijer (Kingston, ON). Format: Poetry readings and open mic. GARTH MARTENS In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Garth Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour. A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming. Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts. Garth Martens is the author of Who Else in the Dark Headed There (Biblioasis, 2026), the chapbook Remediation (JackPine, 2018), and Prologue for the Age of Consequence (Anansi, 2014), for which he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, BODY Literature, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Fiddlehead, Vallum, Grain, Prism, Grain, Hawkeye Magazine, High Horse (one and two), Unlikely Stories, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is co-founder of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives on Vancouver Island. Find him on Instagram @garthmartens. SADIQA DE MEIJER Sadiqa de Meijer's latest book is the poetry collection Qaf's People, reviewed as “boldly cosmological” (Paisley Conrad in the Montreal Review of Books) and “a Promethean feat” (Shazia Hafiz Ramji in Quill & Quire). Her essay collection In The Field was described as “a work of art, both in the sense that the thing in itself is sublime, and the sense that, by integrating experience, poetry, and (what CW Mills called) ‘the sociological imagination’ just so, the book models how the essay form can push against the limits of human expression” (James Cairns in Spring Magazine). Her book alfabet/alphabet won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, and is forthcoming in French translation. Sadiqa's work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Brick Magazine, and the Best Canadian Poetry and Best Canadian Essays series. She is the current Poet Laureate of Katarokwi/Kingston. “If there is a mother country and a father country / if an ocean, or some seas, or river after river after river / breathe between your right side and your left / you’re from Qaf,” offers Governor General Award-winning writer Sadiqa de Meijer in, Qaf’s People, an elegant and ambitious exploration of mixed-race identity, diaspora, and the precarities of belonging, set in an imagined landscape drawn from Islamic mythology. Here, “a seedling body wearing a smock or backwards old // dress shirt makes a map.” Here, the Netherlands, Kenya, and Canada overlap, and “we love where we are from without a flag.” Within de Meijer’s skillful poems, history’s many tributaries converge, their confluence offering new ways of understanding the complexities of lives lived across and through continents, languages, and cultures. Qaf’s People is a book rich with inquisitive beauty and interrogative poise. MORRIN CENTRE The Morrin Centre is a nationally recognized heritage site, museum, and leading English-language cultural centre located in the heart of historic Old Quebec City. Built over 200 years ago as one of the city’s first jails, it now houses one of the world’s most beautiful libraries. The Centre’s mission is to provide the English- and French-speaking public with rich, engaging programming in the areas of heritage interpretation, education, and the arts.