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 7:15 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 6:45 and 7:00, put your name in the hat to read at open mic. Planet Earth Poetry acknowledges with respect that we read and write on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.
FRIDAY, october 18, 1:30PM: PLANET EARTH POETRY IN JAMES BAY
Join us for our featured reader Alessandra Naccarato as part of the afternoon reading series at New Horizons in James Bay.
Hosted by Sheila Martindale.
october 2019
Check out all the events at the Victoria Festival of Authors
thursDAY, october 3, 2019
VICTORIA FESTIVAL OF AUTHORS, METRO THEATRE
BILLY-RAY BELCOURT, ERIN MOURE & EVE JOSEPH
NOTE: This event, in partnership with the Victoria Festival of Authors, is on a Thursday night.
This year’s Griffin Prize-winning book, Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s Quarrels, is a collection of prose poems that trust in the logic of the illogical. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry carves new forms for new subject matter in his latest collection, NDN Coping Mechanisms. Longtime student of language and translation, lover of misspellings and un-corrections, Erin Mouré’s new work, The Elements, is a polylingual drawing which parallels the uprising of Galician peasants against Napoleon’s army and the experience of witnessing her father’s dementia. Join us for an evening of poetry that asks what poetry is and what it can do.
Thursday, October 3, 7:30pm
Metro Theatre | 1411 Quadra St.
Tickets: $15
Marilyn Bowering’s What is Long Past Occurs in Full Light
FRIDAY, october 11, 2019
MARILYN BOWERING &VALENTINA CAMBIAZO
Marilyn Bowering’s new book of poems, What Is Long Past Occurs in Full Light, weaves meditations on absences and loss with personal, local and cultural memories. The poems flourish with transformative interconnections between literature, ecology, civilization, history and personal critique.
“Bowering is one of our essential poets. Despite her unflinching acknowledgement of the horrors humans visit on themselves and others, her vision is grounded in the subtle integrity of love.”
—Jan Zwicky
“Tender. Passionate. Informed. Haunting.”
—Jane Munro
Marilyn Bowering is a poet, novelist and librettist with deep roots in Victoria.. Her work has been short-listed for the world-wide Orange Prize, and awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Pat Lowther, Dorothy Livesay, and Gwendolyn McEwen poetry prizes. Her opera with the composer Gavin Bryars received its UK premiere in May.
www.marilynbowering.com
Valentina Cambiazo’s The Schedule of Loss
Valentina Cambiazo was born in Santiago, Chile and has lived in Canada since the age of twelve. She has also lived in Spain, France, and the US. Her travels have taken her to eastern Canada, Chile, Mexico, and Europe. She now lives and works in Victoria. Her first novel, Dark Spirit, is set in 14th century France. She is currently working on a travel memoir entitled Into the Heart of Darkness: Six Harrowing Months in the South of France.
The Schedule of Loss takes you from the desolate regions of the human heart, through the secret, humming life of gardens, to a distant star in the Lagoon Nebula. From vanishing wild cats, to poisoned oceans, to drowning valleys; these poems are an elegy to those elemental forces we depend on, and barely understand.
Alessandra Naccarato (photo: Jacklyn Atlas)
FRIDAY, october 18, 2019
alessandra naccarato & D.A. lockhart
Alessandra Naccarato is the recipient of the 2015 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the winner of the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. Currently based in Toronto, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and has toured nationally and internationally as a spoken word artist. Her debut poetry collection, Re-Origin of Species (Book*hug, 2019) combines personal narrative and natural study to tell a story of adaptation and evolution, and was featured in Fall Previews by CBC Books, 49th Parallel, and the Globe and Mail.
Re-Origin of Species
From hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real.
These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change. A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.
D.A. Lockhart’s Devil in the Woods
D.A. Lockhart is the author of The Gravel Lot that Was Montana, This City at the Crossroads, and Big Medicine Comes to Erie. His work has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. He is also the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press. A Turtle Clan member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong on the south shore of the Detroit River (most often referred to as the border cities of Windsor ON and Detroit MI). Devil in the Woods is his fourth poetry collection.
A collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians.
D.A. Lockhart’s stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture).
Cassidy McFadzean’s Drolleries
FRIDAY, october 25, 2019
Cassidy McFadzean & Pamela Porter
Cassidy McFadzean was born in Regina, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently lives in Toronto. Her debut collection Hacker Packer (McClelland & Stewart 2015) won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Drolleries (M&S 2019) is her second book.
Invoking human-animal hybrids in various stages of metamorphosis, Drolleries veers between the beasts of the forest and the opulence of the art gallery. In sonically rich lyric poems that traverse the vulnerability of confession and the dramatic possibilities of persona, Drolleries invokes its monsters as a means of working through internal turmoil, existential doubt, and heartbreak. This collection investigates how the lure of romantic relationships, the enchantments of art, and the seductions of power can be both destructive and transformative.
Pamela Porter
Pamela Porter is the author of 14 published books—10 volumes of poetry and four books for children and young adults, including two novels in verse. Her work has earned more than a dozen provincial, national, and international awards, including the inaugural Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for best poem, the 2013 Malahat Review 50th Anniversary Poetry Prize, the Our Times Poetry Award for political poetry, the 2012 FreeFall Magazine Poetry Award, the 2011 Prism International Grand Prize in Poetry, the 2010 Vallum Magazine Poem of the Year Award, as well as the CBC, Raymond Souster and Pat Lowther Award shortlists. Her novel in verse, The Crazy Man, won the 2005 Governor General's Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children, the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, the Texas Institute of Letters Young Adult Book Award, and other prizes. Pamela lives near Sidney, BC with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs, and cats.
About Likely Stories:
These poems featuring the brilliant, the misfit, and the music of the stars summon us into the heart of what it means to be human and passionate on this wild ride we call life on Earth. Mileva Einstein, the forgotten genius; Josef Stalin’s only daughter, as she flies off to the US; Robert Schumann, composing symphonies from an asylum; the view from Mars; horses sensing a predator; the road toward forgiveness — in this gathering of the factual and fantastical, the lyrical and wise, a rich humanity steps forth.