The Planet Earth Poetry reading series is a launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not. It is a place where words are most important. A venue in which all manner of poets and writers are welcome; a place for excellence, innovation, collaboration, diverse projects and experiments. The evening begins at 7:30 with an open mic, followed by a featured reader(s). Planet Earth Poetry is located at Hillside Coffee and Tea, 1633 Hillside Ave (across from Bolen Books). Between 7 and 7:15, put your name in the hat to read at open mic.
Jeff Steudel photo: Aaron Aubrey
FRIDAY, april 8, 2016
jeff steudel &
dymphny dronyk
Jeff Steudel’s poetry has appeared in several publications including, PRISM international, CV2, The Fiddlehead, subTerrain, and Canadian Literature. He has received the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and his work was chosen as a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards. Foreign Park is his first book of poetry. He lives in Vancouver.
Contrary Infatuations, by Dymphny Dronyk
Dymphny Dronyk is a mediator by vocation, and communications consultant by default. She works a mediator for Alberta Justice and is also a writing and life coach. She is passionate about the magic of story, and has woven words for money and for love for more than 30 years. Her first volume of poetry,
Contrary Infatuations, was short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in 2008. She is the co-publisher and co-editor at House of Blue Skies whose bestselling anthologies include 2014’s The Calgary Project – A City Map in Verse and Visual. She is also editor of the online Blue Skies Poetry forum.
She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about immigration in Dutch, her mother tongue, and in English, her second language, entitled Exiled Transatlantic.
Bedlam Cowslip, by Jeanette Lynes
FRIDAY, april 15, 2016
jeanette lynes &
carla funk
Jeanette Lynes’ seventh book of poetry, Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems published by Wolsak and Wynn's Buckrider Books imprint (2015) has been shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Jeanette's first novel, The Factory Voice, was long listed for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and a Re Lit Award. Jeanette directs the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan. She lives in Saskatoon.
Gloryland, by Carla Funk
Carla Funk, in her fifth book of poetry, illuminates the small and marvelous marginalia of earth, like the glistening trail of a snail on route, and looks prophetically to the not-so-distant future where cities burn and the body falls to ruin. A meditation on endings, intermingling wonder and praise with question and elegy, Gloryland offers poems for an apocalyptic age.
Born and raised in Vanderhoof, BC, one of the earliest Mennonite settlements in the province, Carla Funk now lives and teaches writing in Victoria, where she served as the city’s inaugural poet laureate from 2006–2008. Her previous books of poetry include The Sewing Room (Turnstone Press, 2006) and Apologetic (Turnstone Press, 2010).
The latest from Gary Geddes.
FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2016
GARY GEDDES &
SUSAN TELFER
Gary Geddes, winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), Lt-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize, has published 45 books. He lives on Thetis Island.
About The Resumption of Play:
The title poem, winner of the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, is “compelling” and “deeply necessary . . . the drive of narrative told with the sonic patterning of poetry.” It’s the urgent story of an Indian residential school survivor, complex, scarred, articulate, flashing with rage and mordant humour and tackles the collision between Aboriginal and Western systems of thought. It’s followed by elegies for the poet’s mother, Pound, Brodsky, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Virginia Woolf, Bronwen Wallace, and much more.
Susan Telfer’s Ghost Town
Susan Telfer is the author of two collections of poetry. Her previous book of poems, House Beneath, was published by Hagios Press in 2009. Her poetry has been published in magazines coast-to-coast and anthologized in Desperately Seeking Susans and Poems from Planet Earth. She appeared at the Festival of Written Arts in 2013 and won the Vancouver Writer’s Festival Poetry Contest that year. She was born and raised on the West Coast and now lives in Gibsons, BC, where she teaches at Elphinstone Secondary.
Joy Russell
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2016
joy russell &
antony di nardo
Born in Belize, Joy Russell is a poet, writer and playwright. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review and Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. She currently lives in North Vancouver.
Roaming Charges by Antony Di Nardo
Antony Di Nardo is a poet and teacher. He is the author of three collections of poetry and his work appears in journals and anthologies, both in Canada and internationally. Formerly at International College in Beirut, Lebanon, he currently divides his time between Sutton, Quebec and Toronto.
The poems in Roaming Charges (Brick Books) occupy the air between Canada and the Middle East, viewer and painting, victim and triggerman, reader and page. Blending a bohemian ebullience with a reporter’s obligation to witness, these poems are a heady and celebratory bouquet of jet fuel, camaraderie, and muezzin music. They look long and hard at their subjects, but also speak of the trail those subjects leave across the sky, with “the sky a constant goofy goodbye.”