friday september 04
beginning of the season
all open mic fundraiser

BOOK SALE:

We’ll be selling gently used books for $5 each. All proceeds go towards bringing you excellent poets throughout Season 31.

WHAT TO BRING: cash, an empty book bag, and your reading glasses.

ALL OPEN MIC:

As always for this event, we ask that your open mic poem be written by a poet other than you. Please choose a favourite poet, a poem that has inspired or moved you, or simply a poem you think we all need to hear.

We’ll gather a list of all the poems read and include it in our newsletter, so please be sure to have the poet’s name, the correct title of the poem, and the name of the book it comes from.

OPEN MIC RULES:

Our usual open mic rules apply: maximum 3 minutes / one poem, and we ask readers to choose poems for a welcoming, inclusive community space.

HOW TO SIGN UP FOR THE OPEN MIC:

Sign-up is from 7:00–7:20 pm, in person at Russell Books, Victoria, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Please note that because September 4 is an All-Open-Mic Night, we will not be livestreaming on Zoom. Livestreaming resumes on September 12.

Poet Yvonne Blomer

friday september 11
sublime: poems for vanishing ice - anthology

In Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice, poets from across Turtle Island explore what it means to enter into conversation with ice. The poems in Yvonne Blomer's third, water-focused anthology exemplify sublime as both verb and adjective: these are poems that skate, drink, stomp, crush and dive. In poems that range from street hockey, to snow angels, to meltwater, poets write to the ever-changing ways of ice. Other poems grapple with fires that melt permafrost and rising temperatures that fracture and erode lives. In the poems, fissures form into ever-expanding crevasses, and animals suffer because of humanity’s negative impact on Earth’s most ancient of water systems: ice.

Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

Poet Kate Rogers

friday september 18
kate rogers

Kate Rogers’ incantatory poems reimagines family, folklore, and climate grief. Her muse: the Slavic witch Baba Yaga, both matriarch and mirror. An aging mother stamps her cloven foot in rage, forgets her children's names, casts spells against wildfire and rescues finches in her deep pockets. Moving between a mother’s decline and sweeping visions of a damaged ecosystem, Baba Yaga and the Girl Who Ate the Rope is a mythic spell-book, both tender and terrifying. (76 words)

Kate Rogers’ new poetry collection, Baba Yaga and the Girl Who Ate the Rope, is out now with Frontenac House. Her five-poem suite, “My Mother’s House” won subTerrain’s Lush Triumphant Contest. Her work has also appeared in Pinhole Poetry, Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, and The Guardian.  (50 words)

Poet Anna Veprinska

friday september 25
anna veprinska

Anna Veprinska is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary and the author of the poetry collections Wound Archive, Bonememory (recently shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry), and Sew with Butterflies. She has also published the monograph Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis.

Her collection Wound Archive is a collection of minimalist poems that archives the wound left by the concurrent ending of a relationship and the beginning of a chronic invisible illness. These poems comprise a fragmented archive in which woundedness turns language—figuratively and at times formally—upside down. The symbol of the wound recurs throughout, punctuating the ways both heartbreak and illness are experienced in the body.

Poet David Martin

friday september 25
david martin

David Martin’s latest collection of poems, nightstead, was published by Palimpsest Press in 2026. He lives in Calgary with his family. 

In his most personal collection to date, award-winning poet David Martin elegizes his younger brother, who died by suicide at the age of twenty-three. With a mixture of childhood recollections and anguished immediate perceptions, nightstead produces a complex memorial while pushing against the utmost limits of memory’s power. Dislocating experiments juxtapose with searingly direct verse to make a haunting poetic memoir that will remain with readers long after they put it down.

Poet Russell Thornton

FRIDAY september 25
Russell Thornton

Russell Thornton’s Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000–2025 (Harbour) brings together representative work from nine previous collections celebrating the fierce mysteries of life. Like the amphoras the poet finds in Tunisia, these poems are beautiful both for their shapely lines and dark emptiness. And, like a North Vancouver sunshower, they flare with intense brightness. The Walrus magazine has called Thornton’s lyrics as he has practised them over twenty-five years “a sweeping body of work” and Thornton himself “a spell caster.” 

Russell Thornton is the author of ten collections, several shortlisted for awards: Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain for the Governor General’s Award, Raymond Souster Award, and Dorothy Livesay Prize; The Hundred Lives for the Griffin Prize; House Built of Rain for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Thornton lives in North Vancouver.