City Lights and Wave books present

Gail Scott with Camille Roy

Gail Scott celebrates the publication of her new collection of poetry

Furniture Music

Published by Wave Books

In Furniture Music, Montreal luminary Gail Scott chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art. Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism, and what it means to write now. Scott’s project is polyvocal, also resonating with the voices of a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.

Gail Scott’s prose works are laboratories for concocting tales about cities across language/genre/gender boundaries. Her 2021 poetics, Permanent Revolution, engaging with radical prose writers across the continent , was short-listed for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Other acclaimed city novels include The Obituary, a fractalled tale of suppressed diversity in post-millennial Québec, also a Grand Prix finalist; Heroine, about radical art and politics in turbulent 80s Montréal; and My Paris, about a sad diarist looking for a lost avant-garde in 90s Paris. Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le désarroi du matelot was a Governor General finalist. She won major studio grants (Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) for New York and Paris. She was an invited writer at Brown, UCSD, University of Alberta, and Université de Montréal, where she taught creative writing for fifteen years. Scott lives in Montréal.

Camille Roy’s most recent book is ​Sherwood Forest​, from Futurepoem. Other books include ​Cheap Speech​, a play from Leroy Chapbooks, and ​Craquer​, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books, as well as ​Swarm​ (fiction, from Black Star Series). She co-edited ​Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative​ (Coach House 2005, re-issued 2010). Earlier books include ​The Rosy Medallions​ (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St. Press) and ​Cold Heaven​ (plays, from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books). Recent work has been published in Amerarcana and Open Space (SFMoma blog).

This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/