Launch: Afric McGlinchey & Luke Morgan
This event has now passed.
Join us for an afternoon of poetry and celebration to launch two new collections – À la Belle Étoile by Afric McGlinchey and Blood Atlas by Luke Morgan. Anne Tannam, Poetry Ireland’s current poet-in-residence will launch both collections. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend at 2pm on Sunday 1st June.
ABOUT THE POETS
Afric McGlinchey
Afric McGlinchey is a multi-award-winning poet and author of Tied to the Wind (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), a hybrid memoir, for which she was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary. It has been translated into Macedonian. Her previous two poetry collections were translated into Italian. A book editor and reviewer, Afric is also a Mentor with the Munster Literature Centre and on the National Poetry Ireland Mentorship Programme. Her new collection, À la belle étoile (Salmon Poetry, 2025), has been nominated for the Forward Prize.
À la Belle Étoile is a blazing narrative of female self-empowerment and survival in late 1700s France – the Age of Exploration. This book-length poem sequence gives voice to a woman almost lost to history, who, through a chance encounter with a botanist, dared to carve her own space in a man’s world. Through a non-linear water and land collage of poems, we hear the voice of Jeanne Baré as she undergoes the destabilising experience of disguising her sex, taking on tasks that require physical stamina, strength and courage, enduring exposure and assault, and collecting thousands of plants never before seen in Europe. Slipping the moorings of her small peasant life, she voyages to exotic lands, until finally, after seven years, she returns home, becoming the first woman to have circumnavigated the world.
Luke Morgan
