Carcanet online book launch: Apple Thieves by Beverley Bie Brahic

Beverley Bie Brahic’s latest poetry collection, Apple Thieves, is her fifth and she will be reading from the book – published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press – and chatting about it with host Katie Peterson.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic grew up in Vancouver and now lives in France. This is important as her poetry is very much grounded in the places and spaces she has experienced. In the poem ‘Root Vegetables’, she  describes a shell collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, with its diverse populations and their migrations – ‘an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely’. She evokes her more recent home of Paris with: ‘Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction’ – ‘time-hedged cottages’.

“Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery,” says the publisher’s blurb, and Beverley Bie Brahic herself says: “I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms.”

Fellow Carcanet poet Carol Rumens, writing in The Guardian, says: “In her original poems, [Beverley Bie Brahic] characteristically moves towards compassionate celebration. Both the short lyrics and the more discursive narratives in her collections are richly and variously peopled, and the Mediterranean glow of generous physicality extends to fruits, flowers and an abundant natural world.”

Beverley Bie Brahic has been a finalist for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection with her poetry collection White Sheets (CB Editions, 2012) – it was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation – and her most recent book, Catch and Release, won the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize. Her other collections are The Hotel Eden, The Hunting of the Boar, a 2016 PBS Recommendation, and Against Gravity. She also translates, and her numerous translations include books by Yves Bonnefoy, Helene Cixous and Charles Baudelaire. The Little Auto, her selection of Guillaume Apollinaire’s First World War poems, was awarded the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize; Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, was a finalist for the 2009 Popescu Translation Prize. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts Writing Grant and fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Host Katie Peterson’s latest book is Fog and Smoke, published this year by FSG. Her previous collections include Life in a Field, the winner of the Omnidawn Open Books Prize (2021), A Piece of Good News, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and The Accounts (2013), winner of the Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis, where she is Professor of English and a Chancellor’s Fellow, and during the 2024-2025 academic year, she is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s St Edmund’s Hall.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.