Catherine Owen, "Moving to Delilah" (Freehand Books, 2024)

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home. NBN host Hollay Ghadery and Catherine enjoy a lively conversation about poetry, community, and this new collection of poems.

In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.

Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.

In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic form.

About Catherine Owen:

Catherine Owen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and prose, her latest being Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024) and Locations of Grief: an emotional geography, memoirs on mourning and place she compiled and edited from 24 Canadian writers (Wolsak and Wynn, 2020.) Born and raised in Vancouver, she has lived in a 1905 house in Edmonton for six years where she hosts the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz, has run the podcast Ms Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws, writes reviews and teaches Communications at NAIT college. Most recently, Moving to Delilah has been longlisted for the Al and Eurithe Purdy Prize for most outstanding new book by an author who has published over five trade book titles. 

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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