Kevin Spenst and Marc Perez enliven Fraser Library with poetry

On a cloudy early evening in June, at Fraser Library on SFU’s Surrey campus, two poets read from their recent poetry collections to an engaged and intimate audience, offering up poems with specific references to Surrey as well as empathic, lyrical reflections on grief and loss, language, belonging, and transient moments of beauty.

Surrey-raised poet Kevin Spenst, who teaches poetry at SFU’s Writer’s Studio, is the author of several chapbooks and collections. The poems in his most recent collection, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space, explore love, loss, and faith – including through his memories of growing up in Surrey – through playful and subversive uses of language and form.

Filipino poet and writer Marc Perez’s debut full-length collection is entitled Dayo, a Tagalog word meaning “someone who exists in a place not their own”: a stranger, immigrant, or wanderer. It follows the journey of a dayo, exploring relationships to place, language, and identity through themes of displacement, exclusion, and belonging.

Over the past few months, Spenst and Perez have read poetry across the province, including cycling together to Vancouver Island for a series of poetry readings and art-and-poetry crawls. They also cycled along Vancouver’s Seawall to read poetry to strangers; as Spenst told the Surrey Now-Leader: “For the most part, people were very receptive, and I really love the surprise of poetry – that is, poetry should be surprising and interesting and language kind of jumps off the page. So what better way to extend that surprise than just approaching people and asking if you want to hear a poem? We had some really good encounters and conversations afterwards."

The evening of poetry in Fraser Library offered both poets the opportunity to share personal poems and stories, including some focusing on Surrey and other local areas such as Bowen Island – as well as surprising attendees with never-before-read poems. “Being back in Surrey might have inspired my first ever reading of ‘Hildaparchment Excelsus von Bingen,’” shared Spenst, “a poem that’s a little more on the challenging side. It was fun reading it in a variety of accents and tones to bring noticeable pleasure to something that could otherwise be a little head-scratching to some. All of this is to say, Marc and I had an appreciative audience.”

At the post-event reception, attendees stayed to mingle and continue the lively discussions inspired by the poetry. For anyone who missed the event, Spenst and Perez shared two links to their video-poems: A poem read by Marc Perez and Lines of poetry that combines lines from both of their poems.

Coordinated by SFU Library in partnership with Black Bond Books, an independent bookseller in Surrey’s Central City Shopping Centre, this poetry event was the first public event in our new and freshly renovated space in Fraser Library. The Library is grateful to Black Bond Books and both of the poets for making this evening of poetry in Surrey a lively, engaging success!