february 3
george elliott clarke - sponsored by the league of canadian poets

Acclaimed for his narrative lyric suites, \lyric “colouring books,” poems, opera libretti and plays, George Elliot Clarke is a native Africadian and Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate. With Canticles, he presents us with a work that views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection.

In 2008, George Elliott Clarke began to write his Canticles, an epic poem treating the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Imperial and colonial conquest, and the resistance to these evils. Now, with Canticles III, Clarke shifts focus from world history and theology to the history of the African (“Africadian”) Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. By doing so he concludes a remarkable epic, an amalgam of Pound and Walcott but entirely and inimitably his own. 

Poetic Appetizer
Advice to the Emperor of China (1861)
(Empires arrive--thrive--on battlefields.
And, luckily, Tyranny isn't bulletproof:
Kings can tumble right off their saddles.)

Pepper the French and British
with so much shot,
their bodies look heaps of soot....

february 6
poetic opener – kim dhillon

Kim Dhillon writes poetry, art theory and criticism, essays and fiction, and teaches writing to visual artists. She lives on the WSÁNEĆ peninsula.

february 10
anne-marie turza - partially sponsored by anonymous

Anne-Marie Turza is the author of two poetry collections, The Quiet (Anansi), and Fugue With Bedbug (Anansi), and the chapbook Slip Minute (Baseline Press). Her poems have been nominated for the Browen Wallace Award and The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She works as a nurse in Victoria, BC.

“Anne-Marie Turza’s second collection with House of Anansi Press is a straight up weird book. But you will delight in its weirdness. Surreal at its core, the collection uses its musicality to ease its reader into the peculiar and to locate similar strangeness in our world...The poems in Fugue With Bedbug continually take on unexpected and lovely new forms. They are truly refreshing.” —Quill and Quire

Poetic appetizer
We have viewed footage from variable sleep,
we scramble up a hill to our interior bodies,
we are in feelings dense as fresh mushrooms,
we have looked as strangers do, like a closed hospital—

february 10
Poetic opener Yvonne Blomer

Yvonne Blomer is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur. Her most recent books of poetry are The Last Show on Earth, As if a Raven and the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, published by Caitlin Press. Yvonne served as the city of Victoria’s poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. She lives, works, and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

february 17
Justene dion-glowa - sponsored by anonymous

Trailer Park Shakes is a book bearing unflinching witness to the workings of injustice— how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. This is a book that seems to want to hold everything—an entire cross-section of lived experience—written by a poet whose courage, attention and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in their words’ embrace. 

Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis creative, beadworker and poet born in Winnipeg and currently living in Secwepemcú'lecw. They are a Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity alumnus. Their microchap, TEETH, is available from Ghost City Press. Trailer Park Shakes is their first full length poetry book. 

Poetic appetizer
...a spider egg sac explosion waiting to unload its writhing progeny onto this world. A million ethereal arms reaching out in the darkness - to be met by slapping hands and balled-up tissue...  (from Tissue)

february 17
PEP in the afternoon!

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 3pm, February 17th with Justene Dion-Glowa. New Horizons Centre is at 234 Menzies St. in James Bay (street parking only). Please note that unlike our evening readings, the afternoon readings will not be livestreamed or recorded. Also please note the time change – 3pm this month rather than 2pm, to accommodate a scheduling conflict.

february 17
poetic opener – kelsey andrews

Kelsey Andrews writes first drafts in plain spiral notebooks with a fancy fountain pen. Published in Prism, The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, and Prairie Fire, she lives in Saanichton, Vancouver Island, on unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory. Her first book of poetry, Big Sky Falling, came out in November of 2021 with Ronsdale Press.

february 24
Sally ito - sponsored by the league of canadian poets

Sally Ito is a writer, translator, and creative writing instructor from Winnipeg. 

In her fourth book of poetry, Sally Ito traverses the complex channels and tributaries of a heart mapped by the ineffable tides of family and faith.

Poetic appetizer
Love consists of sentence translations,
as if one by one, each word, like a bird, flies into
the hand of the other. 

(From "Love Consists of Sentence Translations" in Heart's Hydrography, p. 69)

february 24
poetic opener – Andrea Mckenzie Raine

Andrea McKenzie Raine was born in Smithers, BC and grew up in Victoria, BC where she still resides. She was enrolled in the Creative Writing program and earned a B.A. in English Literature at the University of Victoria in 2000. She has attended the successful Planet Earth Poetry reading series (formerly known as Mocambopo) in Victoria, BC since 1997, and participated in the Glenairley writing retreats led by Canadian poet and novelist Patrick Lane in Sooke, BC. She published two books of poetry titled A Mother’s String (2005) and A Year of Mornings (2017) through Ekstasis Editions, as well as several self-published poetry books. Her poetry has appeared in Mocambo Nights, Canadian Literature journal, Quills, Borderlines anthology (Ascent Aspirations magazine), Tempus anthology (Rubicon Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Tongues of Fire anthology, and Glenairley chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane (Leaf Press). She lives with her husband and two young sons and, by day, is employed as a correspondence writer for the provincial government. She has also published three novels as a series titled Turnstiles (2014), A Crowded Heart (2015) and Beyond the Summer Grass (2020).

WRITING PRACTICE WITH Anne hopkinson
SATURDAY, February 25 @11AM PACIFIC TIME

Join us for Writing Practice on Zoom. Writing Practice is free to attend — please feel free to invite a friend and share these Zoom credentials with them. We’ll have exercises, discussion, and silent time to write together.

Sign up for Zoom credentials HERE!
*Note this is a Zoom-only event.