ARGONAUT BOOKS

Join us for an evening in the bookshop to celebrate local author Frances Cannon's debut novel 'Vernal Thaw'.

This event will be chaired by Rosa Campbell.

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VERNAL THAW: A Novel of Love at a Slant traces the entangling and unraveling of a queer relationship through love and tumult over the course of a year in Vermont. Franky, a young adjunct professor haunted by encounters with violent men, falls into an intense relationship with Vera, an older neurosurgeon shaped by a childhood in homophobic Soviet-era Ukraine. As they attempt to build a life together, their shared desire snags on unhealed wounds. An ambiguous darkness drifts between literature, dreams, and reality—ghostly forms beneath the ice, a midwinter house flood, the death of a mutual friend, secret longings—testing the tenuous intimacy between Franky and Vera.

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Franky (Frances) Cannon is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow and the Storm, (Green Writers Press, 2025), Vernal Thaw (Set Margins’ Press, 2026), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (Valiz Press, 2026). Her work can also be found in journals and magazines, including The New York Times. Franky curates the digital publication queerflora.org.

Rosa Campbell lives in Leith, and is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where she teaches poetry, poetics, and queer and feminist studies. Her first book, Pothos, a lyric essay/memoir about grief and houseplants, was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books, and she is the editor of The Miraculous Season: The Selected Poems of V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang (Carcanet, 2024; forthcoming in North America with NYRB in July 2026). She is currently working on a critical biography of Lang and a book on the poetics of failure.