Friday, april 05
an evening of poetry celebrating the malahat review

For National Poetry Month, Planet Earth Poetry is celebrating Canada’s iconic literary journal, The Malahat Review *
Hosted by The Malahat Review’s Editor, Ian Higgins.
Please bring along any issue of The Malahat Review that features your work and share one of your poems at the open mic.
We are planning to LIVESTREAM the entire event from 7:30pm!
*Subscriptions to the journal available on the evening*

Poet D.S. Stymeist

friday, april 12
D.S. stymeist

D.S. Stymeist’s tender and visionary second collection, Cluster Flux, is an explosion of transmissions: across boundaries, time, material states, and modes of awareness. The book—propelled by the engine of its central long poem, “Mass Transfer” —is a shotgun blast, a wake-up call: “The plank and ping of it bangs into your soles, / travels the length of leg, runs up into spine, / shakes chest and chassis.”    

Recently published with Frontenac House, Cluster Flux is D.S. Stymeist’s newest collection of poetry. His well-received debut, The Bone Weir, was a finalist for the Canadian Author’s Association Poetry Award. Alongside living with the disabling effects of chronic disease (Crohn’s), he currently teaches creative writing at Carleton University.

Poetic Appetizer 

from D.S. Stymeist’s poem “Mass Transfer"

Steel cars ride the jolt and jive of the rails;
scattered chunks of landscape heave into view,
recede in saltando, clacking beats.

Poet Torsten Schoeneberg

April 12
torsten schoeneberg

Born and raised in Germany, Torsten Schoeneberg published short stories there before immigrating to Victoria in 2016, where he has published poems in local publications such as Oratorealis. His current work in progress includes reviews of fictional books. His (real) book Brenda Craigdarroch Doesn’t Care If You Read This Book was published in late 2020. The collection of 21 prose poems around the quirky character Brenda has gained a cult following. His writing combines trends of current European literature with a distinct Canadian West Coast feel.

Poet Jess Housty

friday, april 19
jess housty ('Cúagilákv)

Jess Housty ('Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with their homelands, their extended family and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.

Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet's motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing — held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors, and by the grief and love that come with communing.  Housty's poems are textural-blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow, and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader's whole body to be transported in the experience.

Poet Simone Littledale

april 19
simone littledale EsCOBAR

Simone Littledale Escobar is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and educator living on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. Her work explores ecological grief, ties to place, the natural world, and personal history; and draws strongly from both her Colombian/Canadian heritage and her upbringing on the Pacific coast. Simone’s work has been published in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and The New Quarterly, and translated into Spanish. 

Poet Pamela Porter

friday, april 26
pamela porter

Pamela Porter is the author of fourteen published books across multiple genres including poetry, novels in free verse, and books for young adults and children. Her work has garnered numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, and first prizes from the Canadian Author's Association, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize, and others.

In her latest book of poetry, Between the Bell Struck and the Silence, Governor-General-Award-winning Pamela Porter contemplates the mysteries of existence. Porter skillfully reimagines familiar emotions: joy, loss, and healing are made new through descriptions of the flight of music, the spirits that dance between dusk and dawn, the blessings of coyotes and chickadees. Themes of Christian theology and the life and work of Van Gogh are woven throughout this rich tapestry of philosophical exploration and the healing powers of art.

Between the Bell Struck and the Silence is a profound offering that delves into the essence of what it means to be an artist and to experience the striking state of being alive, with all of its joys and sorrows. With this introspective collection, Porter invites a generous appreciation for the world and life itself.

Poet Keith Gaberian

april 26
keith garEBian

Keith Garebian’s Three-Way Renegade, written in 8-line verses, is bold, visceral, and unapologetically erotic as it fashions a vivid satiric portrait of Samuel Steward, a largely forgotten icon of the 20th century gay world. Using vignettes (serious and comic), it dramatizes his life as a discontented literary academic, tattoo artist, and writer of erotic and pornographic literature. A colourful mosaic, backed by scholarship, its lyrical, pungent poems shed light on angles and radiations of universal risks and their consequences in gay subculture.