What better way to celebrate poetry month at the Bell Jar than with our long awaited visiting poet, Brecken Hancock, in from Ottawa, as well as two exceptionally talented Toronto poets: Michelle Brown and Robin Richardson! This is going to be one spectacular night of words, my friends!

Spring is here, words are popping up out of the soil, flowers are blooming from our mouths, hirsute neutralizers of all shades of irony are dusting off and greasing up and mounting their trusty velocipedes, anticipating a return of Bear Flag's vinos and Pabst's Blue Ribbons to the best park benches, quickly, quickly, before our increasingly desperate Now! magazine editorialists push our happily oblivious constables to the limits of public decency in order to spoil a good thing for all. But we will always have poetry in candlelit rooms serving delectable cocktails...and this Tuesday eve we might also have a patio!

Come for the words and the wine!

BRECKEN HANCOCK's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Lemon Hound, The Globe & Mail, Hazlitt, Studies in Canadian Literature, and on the site Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Her first book of poems, Broom Broom Coach House, 2014, was named by The Globe & Mail's Jared Bland as a debut of the year and by the National Post as a top poetry collection of 2014. She lives in Ottawa.

MICHELLE BROWN has been published in journals such as cV2, The Malahat Review and Prism. She was recently shortlisted for cV2's Young Buck poetry prize. Happy to still be considered young, she's now spending all her free time on Snapchat like the other kids.

ROBIN RICHARDSON is the author of Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis and Grunt of the Minotaur. Her third collection of poems, Sit How You Want is forthcoming with Signal Poetry. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Tin House, Arc, The Malahat Review, Witness and may others. She was a finalist for the Walrus Poetry Prize, The ReLit award, The Lemon Hound Poetry Prize, and CBC Poetry Prize, and has won the John B. Santoianni Award awarded by The Academy of American Poets and the Joan t. Baldwin Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence, and lives in Toronto.