April 25th, 2026
19:00-22:30
Doors at 19:00.
An evening of poetry, sound, image, and conversation for the launch of Xiaoxuan Huang’s book all the time: poems & traces (Metatron Press, 2026.) Featuring special guests grim beverage, Mateo Paredes Heidemann, and Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora.
This event is free for all to attend.
Books, cassettes, and other ephemera will be on sale. Bar and garden will be open!
About the book:
In all the time: poems & traces, Xiaoxuan Huang crafts a profound exploration of queer longing, the fragility of language, and the spaces between speech and silence. Blending love letters, fragmented aphorisms, and poems where silence itself becomes a punctuation mark, this genre-defying collection asks: If words can never fully capture what we mean, do we still dare to speak?
Rooted in poetic rigor and philosophical inquiry, all the time insists on the urgency of address, even when words falter. It is poetry that thinks as deeply as it feels, inviting readers to linger in the liminal spaces between breath, memory, and meaning. For those who seek works that blur the lines between theory and heartache, this is a luminous testament to the necessity of speaking—even when the destination remains unknown.
Artist Bios
grim beverage is the moniker of Montreal-based, via kngstn / kmptvll, guitar player Graham Beverley. He makes wordless, semi-improvised fingerstyle reverberations to soothe the anxious mind. He enjoys tape hiss, long delays, resonant frequencies, Bruce Cockburn, minimalism, repetition, the occasional beer.
Mateo Paredes Heidemann (he/him) is a Peruvian-Dutch-Canadian artist based on the lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, whose practice focuses on image-making, writing and ceramics. Through his work, he explores experiences of migration, familial separation, grief, the division of self-hood, and the relationship between place and subjectivity.
Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora is an inter-disciplinary artist/host of C.L.A.M. who works as a writer and critic, a studio assistant for Tom Burrows, and in archives for artists and artist-run organizations. Yasmine holds a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and currently lives and works between the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ and the K’ómoks First Nation.
Xiaoxuan Huang (she/they) is a writer, performer, scholar, & educator working in hybrid poetics & autotheory. Her full-length publications include Love Speech (Metatron Press 2019,) and all the time: poems & traces (Metatron Press 2026.) Their work has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, & the Al-Purdy Writer in Residency Program. Xiaoxuan holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus,) and currently teaches Creative Writing at Capilano University. She is a 1.5 generation Shanghainese-Canadian who is living on the traditional and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people.