Babelalia: poetry reading & conversation was a great poetry reading/book launch with fifteen people in attendance within the Langley community. Through the combined efforts of myself, poets, Nina Mosall and Kyle McKillop, and the Soft Studio art gallery we were able to pull off a tremendous event in honor of poetry and the arts.
Through poetics of diasporic identity, poets Winston Lê and Nina Mosall invoked, reshaped, and celebrated their Vietnamese and Iranian heritages, respectively. Hosted and moderated by poet and educator, Kyle McKillop. This event was the last in a series of soft launches that I (Winston) organized to launch my forthcoming poetry chapbook, Thhhhh in May. This grant was to solely fund the Langley launch happening on May 17th, 2025.
Thhhhh is a long poem sequence that deconstructs and reconstructs the remaking of the dental fricative, “th” through the character arc of Thorn. Thorn is a diasporic Vietnamese girl who undergoes the transfiguration of linguistic body horror in relation to the materiality of her namesake. Part horror monster mythology, part neologistic workshop—these poems chronicle the sonic vessel of the voiceless dental fricative, th. A canonicity about the aspirated and unaspirated characters within this multilingual matrix. Nonexistent in Vietnamese phonetics, Thorn serializes a poetic lore built on this oral continuity of tongue and teeth consonance to revolt against language attrition and erasure. Through metaphors of failed tongues, bilinguality, word puzzles, asemic writing, and mutated vowels, this translanguaging coda emancipates the power of names. The poems in this collection focus on the rearticulation, translingual hybridity, and dynamic language-making in the wake of imperial and colonial violences.
The venue space for this event, Soft Studio is a new and upcoming art gallery/event space within the Lower Mainland. Through the combined efforts of the Soft Studio team and our featured authors, we created an engaging and communal literary salon series. Structurally, this event was a double feature series with two poets. Nina Mosall and myself were featured poets and had the opportunity to read from our work. Poet and educator, Kyle McKillop was our host and moderator for the event. He introduced the poets and moderated us through a discussion about poetics and cultural identity. Afterwards, Kyle opened up a Q&A from the audience. Afterwards we had the opportunity to mingle, sell and sign books, etc. In terms of positive impact within the community and neighborhood, this event helped raise a precedence for interest and community engagement for the literary arts within the Langley community. Creative expression in the arts has always been a means to spark conversation and develop community engagement.
Ultimately, the success of this event has inspired me to curate future literary endeavors in both the City and Township of Langley. I send my utmost gratitude to the Association of Neighborhood Houses BC who helped support and fund this event through the Small Neighborhood Grants.
