Poet Catherine Owen

Friday, May 3
catherine Owen

Catherine Owen was born and raised in Vancouver and now lives in a 1905 home in Edmonton. She is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose, including The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn 2002), Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009), Designated Mourner (ECW 2014) and her new book, Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024). Her work has won awards, been translated, toured across Canada 12 times and served as dance, music and theatre-based collaborations. She also runs the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz, the blog Marrow Reviews and the podcast Ms Lyric's Poetry Outlaws.

In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.

Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.

In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic forms.

Poetic Appetizer
from Catherine Owen’s collection Moving to Delilah:

The house becomes another body
or your own, othered out,
a wood-and-cement flesh

much older than yours and so able
to offer endurance to the everyday,
an eros of endlessness in the now.

Poet Sandy O’Reilly

friday, may 3
Sandy o’reilly

Sandy O’Reilly lives and writes in Victoria BC on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen speaking peoples known as the Esquimalt and Songhees nations. She has been regularly speaking her poetry at the Friday evening Planet Earth Poetry reading series for the last ten years. She has two poems published in The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling! –a collection of Pandemic Poems edited by Sheila Martindale.

Poet Donna Kane

friday, May 10
Donna Kane

A recipient of the BC Medal of Good Citizenship, Donna Kane is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse and four books of poetry including Orrery, a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent poetry book is Asterisms (Harbour, 2024).

An eclectic collection of poems that celebrates the universe and the natural world of which we are all a part. Reflecting on subjects ranging from Comet NEOWISE to swallowtail butterflies to The Incredible Hulk, Kane’s new book is a thought-provoking follow up to her last collection, Orrery. Diverse in tone and subject matter, mixing humour and wonder, the poems in Asterisms take readers on a soul-stirring journey through the expansiveness of space and the interconnectedness of all life on earth.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Comet NEOWISE, 2020” by Donna Kane:

A briefly struck match igniting the leading
question—how did we get to be where we are?
Sublimation powders the chambers of our
empty ice cube trays, bursts of curiosity
subside to “The nights were cloudy.” “I forgot to look up.”

Poet Matt Rader (photo credit Maria Alexopoulos)

friday, May 10
matt rader

Matt Rader is an award-winning author of six volumes of poetry, a collection of stories and a book of nonfiction. His previous book of poems, Ghosthawk, was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and lives in Kelowna, BC.

Charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm, Matt Rader addresses the extraordinary natural, historical and social events of the heat dome and atmospheric river in 2021, the ongoing pandemic and resulting social anomie, the public announcement of hundreds of unmarked residential school graves, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a personal level, the poems grapple with questions of disability, illness, trans identity, healing and what a good future might look like.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Heat Dome” by Matt Rader:

What is pleasure 
without an ending
When the spider bit me 
I didn’t feel anything

Poet Hollay Ghadery

friday, May 17
hollay ghadery

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/ Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023. Widow Fantasies, her collection of short fiction, is forthcoming with Gordon Hill in fall 2024. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 HITS FM Bookclub, as well as HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township.

This explosive debut collection pushes against the limitations of gender roles, race, bodies and minds, and explores our insignificance and impotence in the universe. The concept of otherness afforded by a marginalized and neurodivergent perspective is brilliantly represented in this book.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Walk it Off” by Hollay Ghadery

Not doing this again—
the sky fat with lakes, 
and lakes fat with skies;
hawk parallax mimicking

a sky fat with lakes
and lunatic ivy in my
veins mimicking the
plummet of stars

Poet Rhea Tregebov

friday, May 17
Rhea Tregebov

Rhea Tregebov is the author of eight collections of poetry, two novels and five children’s picture books. She has edited numerous anthologies as well. Tregebov lives and writes in Vancouver, where she is Associate Professor Emerita at the School of Creative Writing at UBC.

Talking to Strangers is a book of bracing encounters. Rhea Tregebov’s uncommon eye for the mysteries of ordinary life is brought to brilliant effect in this, her eighth book of poetry. In gorgeous arias of recollection and evocation, of elegy and heartbreak, Tregebov mourns, praises, prays, regrets, summons, celebrates, and bears witness with formidable artistry and tenderness. Direct, never forced, keenly observant, and marked by scrupulous craft, these new poems unfold in beguiling, often breathtaking ways. 

Poetic Appetizer
from “How it Works” by Rhea Tregebov:

Though I don’t know how planes work
I fly. This miracle, a thing we’ve made. Trust
is necessary or we crash. I thought love 
was a thing, some thing I could touch with my hands

Poet Coner Kerr
Photo credit: Jordon Hon

friday, May 24
Coner kerr

Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer living in Edmonton. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is descended from the Lac Ste. Anne Metis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family are settlers in Treaty 4 and 6 territories in Saskatchewan. He grew up in Saskatoon, Buffalo Pound, Edmonton, and other prairie towns and cities. In 2022 he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch.  He is the author of the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers and Old Gods, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General’s award. His novel, Avenue of Champions, was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize and won the 2022 ReLIT award. He has a new novel, Prairie Edge, coming out in Spring 2024. Conor is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta where he teaches creative writing.

Conor Kerr’s poetry is in constant motion. Runners streak through the night, racing with coyotes and roving across the land. Buses travel from town to town, from one memory to another, from past to present. Friends and lovers search for each other on Instagram and find nothing. And always the natural world travels alongside: the watching magpies, woodpeckers and cedar waxwings, the coyotes and porcupines. Family is the crisp wings of mallard ducks flying at dawn, just as it is a game of crib, a Mario Kart race, a dance party.

Old Gods defies colonialism on the Prairies. Kerr situates his reader in the Métis mindset: the old gods of the land are alive within the rivers, the birds, the hills and the prairies that surround us, and they’ll always be here.

Poet Shō Yamagushiku

friday, may 24
Shō Yamagushiku

Shō Yamagushiku's work is grounded in a diasporic okinawan consciousness. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). His first poetry collection, entitled shima reflects ancestors, violence and tradition.

shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt Yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. shima speaks through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future.

Poetic Appetizer

We dig bloody moons from the horizon
Prayers erupting from our skin.

We climb these tall shoots and stems
Back-bend down to green ground.

I can tell my brother is light and heat
I forget mirrors and my hatred of trees.

Poet Kevin Spenst

friday, May 31
Kevin Spenst

Kevin Spenst is the author of four full-length books of poetry along with sixteen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Recto Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers (co-written with Joshua Pitre for Collusion Books) and Hymned Data (Pinhole Poetry.) He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.

Poetic Appetizer
from “At the Foundations of our Carnal Kingdom”

When you are the moon 

         and I press myself against you as a figure to be seen from the earth 

When the back of my eye shimmers like a prayer 

                and your hands are two animals on the cliff of my unbecoming

When your eye is a tunnel of forested green 

        and I am a botanist gazing in 

When I am the landscape 

              and you mouth a murmuration of starlings 

When you are the grace of a rose 

                                          and I bring the raucous iridescence of a hummingbird 

Poet Marc Perez

friday, May 31
Marc Perez

Originally from Manila, Marc Perez lives in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Fiddlehead, EVENT Magazine, decomp journal, CV2, PRISM international, Vallum, among others. A recipient of grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, he has a BFA from the UBC School of Creative Writing. He is the author of the chapbook, Borderlands (Anstruther Press, 2020), and the full-length poetry collection, Dayo (Brick Books, 2024). 

Dayo: a Tagalog word referring to someone who exists in a place not their own. A wanderer, migrant worker, exile or simply a stranger. At its core, the poems in Dayo interrogate whether belonging can exist in a society suffused with violence. Here, the poet, as a stranger, confronts the politics of recognition by offering his vision. Reflexive and lyrical, this collection embodies the true curiosity and tenacious spirit of a dayo seeking a place to replant, tend, and grow delicate roots.