friDAY, november 6, 2020

kevin spenst

Kevin Spenst is the author of over a dozen chapbooks and his latest full-length book of poetry is Hearts Amok (Anvil Press). He lives on unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver) where he teaches Creative Writing at VCC, co-hosts poetry interviews on Wax Poetic (CFRO 100.5FM), and explores possibilities with the love of his life Shauna Kaendo.

In language that twists together hobo slang and flights of troubadourish diction, Hearts Amok scrutinizes the history of the love sonnet in Surrey, England and simultaneously celebrates the tickings and tollings of one love-struck heart in Surrey, British Columbia. Examining the underpinnings of love, this book journeys from the Middle Ages to the present where Spenst dates his way through Vancouver to finally find the love of his life.

Order Hearts Amok through Anvil Press.

friDAY, november 13, 2020

john barton

John Barton’s twenty-eight books, chapbooks, and anthologies include Seminal: Canada’s Gay-Male Poets; Polari; We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos; and, in 2020, Lost Family: A Memoir (a book of sonnets with Signal), and The Essential Derk Wynand (Porcupine’s Quill). He is the City of Victoria’s fifth, first male, and first queer poet laureate. 

A bold experiment in autobiography, Lost Family: A Memoir is a book of sonnets that centres around the deaths of John Barton’s parents and sister, but also tracks much of the poet’s early life in Alberta through to a complicated, restless adulthood. Alongside accounts of love, friends and heroes, intolerance, AIDS, and the struggle for equality, Barton’s collection of poems—his first in six years—explores how being queer rewrites and expands society’s sense of lineage, both given and chosen.

Order Lost Family through:
Vehicule/Signal
Munro’s Books
Chapters Indigo

friDAY, november 20, 2020

wendy morton & Kate Marshall Flaherty

Tune in for a special birthday video of Wendy reading poetry in her garden.

IN WENDY’S WORDS
And so this birthday, my 80th, who would have thought, no celebration.

The world fearful and closed.

But the poems:
Her head full of garden plums and raspberries, 
seaweed and lovage,
always the garden tucked into her poems.
—Isa Milman

The poems, the poems. My garden.

Kate Marshall Flaherty was shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year 2019 and Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize 2018. She inaugurated Poetry in Union, Poetry and Healing for Sick Kids, and writes spontaneous P.O.E.M.s (Poem of the Extraordinary Moment) for people on a typewriter through Zoom during these challenging times.

Kate Marshall Flaherty’s collection Radiant emanates optimism in the face of a terrifying breast cancer journey. The narrator returns to that positivity often, even through intense fear, questioning and anger. Wonder, even at her own process, brings her to resilience, wisdom and even humour. Her oceanic images describe a pilgrimage, which suffuses her tumour with Light. This is a collection of daring, courageous and honest poems, worthy of the “medal of honour” she pins on her own wounded chest.

Order Radiant through Kate Marshall Flaherty’s website.

friDAY, november 27, 2020

jane munro

Jane Munro’s sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. A member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, she’s been a professor of Creative Writing at several universities in British Columbia, taught many informal writing workshops, and read her poetry to audiences across Canada. For more than 20 years, she has studied (in Canada and India) and practiced Iyengar Yoga. In 2012, she moved back to Vancouver—where she grew up and raised her children—after spending 20 years living rurally on the coast of Vancouver Island.

Griffin Poetry Prize winner returns with new poems that are spacious with interiority, alive with a hard-earned lightness.

Waves carried a glass float—designed to hold up a fishing net—across the Pacific. Beached it safely. Someone’s breath is inside it. In Glass Float, her seventh collection, award-winning poet Jane Munro considers the widening of horizons that border and shape our lives, the familiarity and mystery of conscious experience, and the deepening awareness that comes with a dedicated practice such as yoga. This book is about connections: mind and body; self and others; physical and metaphysical; art and nature; west and east, north and south. In “Convexities,” the book’s opening poem, Munro quotes the grandfather who taught her to paint: “art is suggestion; art is not representation.” No concavities, he said. Only the “little hummocks” that her pencil outlined as she did contour drawings. Munro’s deft suggestion, her tracing of convexities, conveys underlying complexities, not by explication but by looking with eyes and heart open to where mysteries almost surface.

“Like glass floats themselves, these neat, clear poems contain Munro’s breath. They cross oceans. Jane Munro’s Glass Float—part travelogue, part journal, part meditation—picks up where Blue Sonoma ends: the speaker finds herself alone, at the live edge of her life. … You are not merely called on to look at yourself but to ‘receive your face.’ A gift.” —Ian Williams, author of Reproduction (winner of the 2019 Giller Prize).

Order Glass Float (and Blue Sonoma) through Brick Books.