february 3
george elliott clarke

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

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
Yvonne Blomer

december 2
Yvonne Blomer

In Book of Places, Yvonne Blomer invites us along for a journey spanning across decades and countries. From a solitary traffic controller on a lonely Nevada highway, to the quizzical regulars of a dodgy pub in the UK, we follow Blomer’s meandering path through poetic snapshots of the figures and sights that populate it. This updated 10th anniversary edition also features an expanded collection of poems, integrating suites of meditations on childhood, and more recent poems reflecting on the ever-developing journey of life. The Book of Places invites us along for a grand adventure, but always leads us home. (from Palimpsest website)

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.

Poetic appetizer
From “Love Poem”

I love you the way
love loves an Elephant
in her leathered, greyed,
her painted toes, her enormity.

The way China does Asia,
sometimes murderously.

february 17
Justene dion-glowa

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
poetic opener – gisela ruebsaat

Gisela Ruebsaat is an award-winning poet whose work has been featured at academic and literary festivals in Canada, the US, and Europe. Gisela’s poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in both literary and academic journals. Her debut collection, Heart Mechanic, was published in 2016.