Velvet-Club Connecting Lesbians & Bi-women around the World

We are incredibly excited to be hosting two of the most evoking queer poets published in the UK today: Mary Jean Chan and Jay Bernard. To celebrate the publication of the debut poetry collections, Flche and Surge, Mary Jean and Jay will read their work at Gay's the Word Bookshop on Friday 12th July at 7pm, with a drinks reception to follow. This is a FREE event, but we ask that you only book if you fully intend to come as space is limited to 40 people. If the event appears full, we would encourage to join the waitlist. Jay Bernard - Surge Jay Bernards extraordinary debut is a fearlessly original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in south London in which thirteen young black people were killed. Tracing a line from New Cross to the towers of blood of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice. A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism both political and personal, witness and documentary Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment. Mary Jean Chan - Flche Flche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan's young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flche'), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one's need for safety alongside the desire to shed one's protective armour in order to fully embrace the world. Central to the collection is the figure of the poet's mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan's childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.

Address : Gay's The Word Bookshop
66 Marchmont Street
London
WC1N 1AB

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