BIBLIOASIS brought to Windsor three poets Thursday night to launch three new books. The writers were Toronto’s Molly Peacock for The Analyst, Victoria poet Patricia Young for her new collection The Apocalypse, and Noah Wareness of Toronto for Real Is The Word They Use To Contain Us. I was anxious to hear each of them and picked up my camera and headed out to Biblioasis on Wyandotte Street.

Molly Peacock was delightful, entertaining, and her poetry, though focusing on therapy, was far less “confessional” as one might have thought. She herself mentioned this. Molly read these poems with authority and feeling in a deliberate but sensitive manner and it clearly resonated with the audience. These poems are exceptional, and deliver ironies in the simplest and most direct way. They are honest, poignant, and her delivery of them connected immediately with her audience in the most compelling way.

Governor General’s Award Winning nominee Patricia Young set out to convey to her audience that the basis of her book was a response to Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing but the work ranges all over the map of emotions and themes and at times deals with the largest of subjects. There is no question of that she is, as some critics have said, “a masterful technician.” Prairie Fire said, “She masons each brick into place just so. …She thrives on ambiguity and twists while fostering a rapt interest in them in the reader.”

Noah Wareness, who arrived late for the reading because he missed or took the wrong train, was forgiven when he got up and enlivened the night with a powerful reading from his new collection that Biblioasis editors described as “stealing electricity from nihilistic horror fiction and shaggy late-night cartoons to create a landscape of profound loss, vertigo and wonder…” Indeed.

Zach Wells, the press’s poetry editor said Wareness is the “explosive secret (on the literary scene) for the past decade.” Perhaps. Maybe Zach is right and maybe after reading this book, as he suggests, “you will see the world a little differently.” It was fun. It was lively. It was in your face.

It is always my great pleasure to see children at a reading. Here Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells listens to the poet reading but keeps a close watch over his young daughter.