Poet Eve Joseph

Poet Sharon McCartney

Poet Patricia Young

Friday, january 5
eve joseph, sharon mccartney and patricia young -
baseline press poets

Eve Joseph’s s first two collections, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010), were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. In the Slender Margin (non-fiction) was published by HarperCollins in 2014. Her most recent collection, Quarrels (Anvil, 2018), won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize. 

Eve Joseph’s chapbook, Distractions, is a collection of twelve prose poems, with subjects as wide-ranging as superpowers, sonnets, seahorses, and sheep farms. With wit and tenderness, her narrator creates a series of dreamscape imaginings, suggesting to the reader that “the trick… is not to pretend something is here but to forget it isn’t.” This is Joseph’s first follow-up to her award winning collection Quarrels.

Poetic Appetizer
from Eve Joseph’s poem “Revisions"

My friend, the Danish poet, is not a
sentimentalist. He lauds the poet who hides his poems in
the tool drawer in the garage. I love poems that disguise
themselves as inchworms and rappel down from heaven.

Sharon McCartney is the author of seven books of poetry, including Metanoia (Biblioasis, 2016) and Villa Negativa (Biblioasis, 2021).

In a 2021 interview, Rob Mclennan asks Sharon McCartney where a poem begins. “All I need is one line to get going. For my current manuscript, it was something that a boy said years ago in Iowa City, when I walked past him at a 7-11. He looked at me and said, 'Hey trouble'… That line stuck.” In her new chapbook, Hey Trouble and Other Poems, McCartney confronts our attraction to trials and tribulations with humour, insight, and sensitivity.

Poetic Appetizer
from Sharon McCartney’s poem “Casual Friday"

Ascending the urine-scented Machu Picchu steps
of the underground LRT station into a March morning,
I am uncharacteristically optimistic. The temperature is
above zero at last! The new hire will be top-notch!

Patricia Young is the author of twelve books of poetry, four chapbooks and one book of short fiction, Airstream (Biblioasis, 2006). A two-time Governor General’s Award nominee, she has also won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her most recent collection of poems is Amateurs at Love (Goose Lane Editions, 2018). 

Patricia Young’s Consider the Paragliders (2017) is now in its third printing. In this collection of 18 prose poems, with a voice that is both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious, we are presented with a mystifying and delicate world of husbands with missing arms, naked men on rooftops, and pregnant girls on the run. Reviewer Michael Dennis describes it as a book of little diamonds: “clear as glass, multi-faceted, sparkling in the right light and harder than nails when needed.”

Poetic Appetizer
from Patricia Young’s poem “Lost and Found"

                                        That night, while he slept, my water broke.
I pulled the suitcase out from under the bed, threw in a toothbrush and
secondhand baby clothes. It was vintage. Satin lining. Brass latches.
Just the right size for a girl on the run.

Poet Cathy Stonehouse

FRIDAY, JANUARY 12
CATHY STONEHOUSE

Cathy Stonehouse is a poet, writer and visual artist who lives in East Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Tseil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam First Nations. They currently teach Creative Writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and 

Dream House, their third collection of poetry, is a long poem in six sections. It investigates female embodiment by calling up such liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, and the recently-vacated family home. A wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative, Dream House interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, after a mother's passing, while tracing a matrilineal path between alienation and belonging. "This is a deeply affecting collection you will not want to miss--and will certainly not forget." (Elizabeth Bachinsky).

Poetic Appetizer
from Section III: “Dream House"

Open the door, cross the threshold. Stairs rise up
like tides. Drowned songs sway
across the landing. Down here, your abandoned skin 
still breathes, an unseen spider
quivering on a web.

Poet Zoe Dickinson

JANUARY 12
Poetic Opener - Zoe Dickinson

Zoe Dickinson is a poet and bookseller from Victoria, BC. She has been published in literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first chapbook, Public Transit, was published in 2015 by Leaf Press, and her second chapbook, intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbook competition. She is a manager at Russell Books and Artistic Director emerita of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.

JANUARY 19
PEP in the afternoon!

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, January 19th, with Ariel Gordon.

Doors at 1:30pm, with sign-up for open mic.

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.

friday, january 19
ariel gordon

Ariel Gordon is a Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. Her most recent books are Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019) and TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020). Ariel is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project in collaboration with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Winnipeg Free Press. 

A literary writer and freelance journalist with a BSc in Biology from the University of Winnipeg and a Bachelor of Journalism from Halifax’s University of King’s College, Ariel also works in publishing as a publicist and event planner.

Ariel Gordon and Planet Earth Poetry will also be offering a workshop on January 20th: Postcards from the World

january 19
poetic opener - Cynthia Woodman Kirkham

An award-winning poet, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham’s work has appeared widely in literary journals and in several anthologies. She has won The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, the Federation of BC Writers Contest, the John Lent Poetry/Prose chapbook award and has been shortlisted for various contests, including the CBC Poetry Prize. She’s the author of with feathers (Kalamalka Press, 2023), Good Holding Ground (Palimpsest Press, 2011), and co-editor of the poetry anthology Poems from Planet Earth (Leafpress, 2013). Another poetry collection, Water Quality, is forthcoming from McGill Queens University Press in Fall 2024. Cynthia teaches, edits and writes from her home in Victoria, BC where she swims in lakes and strolls to the sea in search of poems. 

Poet Nicholas Bradley

friday, january 26
nicHolas bradley
(Funded through the league of Canadian poets)

Nicholas Bradley is the author of two books of poetry: Rain Shadow (University of Alberta Press, 2018) and Before Combustion (Gaspereau Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry 2024. He lives in Victoria, BC – in lək̓ʷəŋən territory.

The routines of work, chores, and parenthood can both define and disquiet us. As the steady stream of anxieties and distractions sets the day-to-day human world adrift, what meaningful relationship remains possible with the natural world? In Before Combustion, Nicholas Bradley writes of the challenges of living with attentiveness and curiosity in a time of atmospheric rivers and forest fires, and of the struggle to reconnect our domestic worlds to greater cycles of place and time.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Being on Fire”

Everything has soured,
passed out of humour. Trust me. My belly
is full of glass, my eyes are rubbed with sand,
and I have been left in the kiln to burn

Poet Allie Picketts

january 26
poetic opener - allie picketts

Allie Picketts is a poet, musician, editor, parent, and teacher who is happiest in the woods. She is thankful to live and write in T’Sou-ke territory on Vancouver Island. Her first poetry collection 'i, nemophile' was released in November 2023. Find Allie at www.alliepickettswrites.com

WRITING PRACTICE WITH cathy stonehouse
SunDAY, january 28 @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.

Login to the zoom room up to ten minutes before the meeting: HERE!
*Note this is a Zoom-only event.