Two Currents Meet in Ottawa: Mekyle Ali Qadir Launches Crescendo at Octopus Books July 7, 2026 – Posted in: Highlights, Poetry, Readings & Excerpts – Tags: Book Launch, Mekyle Ali Qadir, Poetry

Some launches announce a book; others announce a voice. The launch of Crescendo, Mekyle Ali Qadir’s debut poetry collection with Mawenzi House on June 29, 2026, at the Mauril-Bélanger Social Innovation Workshop (The Atelier) in Ottawa was firmly the latter. The evening drew more than forty readers, writers, scholars, family and friends, with thirty copies of the collection finding new shelves by night’s end.

Mekyle opened with a reading of the collection’s introduction, “Two Currents,” in which he describes the twin forces that drive his work: the mystical verse of the Sufi tradition, where there is “no ‘voice’ and only Voice,” and the postcolonial inquiry that began the moment Canada handed him its labels. In Crescendo, those currents don’t compete, they compose. The collection moves like a piece of music, from the opening “Quarternotes: Chaos” to its closing “Silence,” and the audience was especially taken with the way the poems carry musicality in their very form, bending time and space the way a score might.

The most affecting moment of the night came with Mekyle’s reading of “Janamaz,” the poem that opens the collection’s second movement, a reading that held the room in a hush before the applause.

The audience itself spoke to the reach of the work. Among those in attendance were the High Commissioner of Pakistan, who took a copy home for the library of the Pakistan High Commission and fellow Mawenzi House author Monia Mazigh. Poets Dave Stymeist, Blaine Marchand and Ellen Chang-Richardson were also present, alongside professors from Carleton University’s Department of English and a lively question period ranged across Sufism, Partition and the migrant condition that runs through the book.

Crescendo (Mawenzi House, 2026) is available now through our website. Our thanks to Greg and the team at Octopus Books for handling book sales on the night, and congratulations again to Mekyle, a debut that begins, fittingly at full volume.