Poet Kayla Czaga

friday, october 04
kayla czaga

Kayla Czaga is the author of the poetry collections Midway, For Your Safety Please Hold On, and Dunk Tank. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award.

Poet Jan Conn

friday, october 04
jan conn

Jan Conn is a poet, biologist and artist, interested in openings in landscapes, associative and diagonal processes, visual and colour fields, dream imagery, memory maps, whimsy, imagined spaces, intuitive drawing, biology in general and trees in particular, visual poetics, organic and geometric form, random markings, icebergs, and roadside attractions.

In Peony Vertigo, Jan Conn’s poetic sensibility disperses and gathers, careens and slides in and out of relation with the endangered world. Through poems ranging from global to microscopic scales, Conn’s beholden, fluid sense of self dissolves into fog and river, and reconstitutes as bright orange newt, prehistoric horse, painter, and mourning daughter. Conn’s voice is vulnerable, ecstatic, and elliptical, always re-emerging out of traumatic memory to joyously engage in being close to species and touched by climates.

Poetic Appetizer
Excerpt - “PART STAR, PART VENOM, PART BONE, PART MICROPLASTIC”

“We are greatly swayed in our thinking
by the rabbit sketched on the full moon’s face
Her tattoos are unexpected⎯hundreds of ants climbing up and down
arms and legs
I wondered what trail they are following”

Poet Tim Lilburn

FRIDAY, october 11
tim lilburn

Tim Lilburn lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry.

His poetry has received the Governor General’s Award, The Canadian Authors’ Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Prize) and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. His poetry has been anthologized and translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three earlier essay collections concerned with desire and place, Living in the World as if It Were Home, Going Home and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place. A new essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, appeared from the University of Alberta Press in 2023.

Poetic Appetizer
excerpt from Tim Lilburn’s book Harmonia Mundi :
“Damascius’s Ascesis, Ambulatory”

His head in the mouth
of the way, he carries the machine
of the entire world-system
across the desert to the lord
on the far side of the River.
Lizard tongue exfoliating
winds. Non-stop.

Poet Warren Heiti

FRIDAY, october 11
warren heiti

Warren Heiti is the author of Hydrologos (Pedlar Press, 2011), Attending (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), and Diaphora (Deer Mountain Pages, 2024), and co-editor of Chamber Music: The Poetry of Jan Zwicky (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015). He lives in Nanaimo on the land of the Snuneymuxw Nation, and teaches philosophy and literature at Vancouver Island University.

friday, october 25

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, October 25, for poet Cassidy McFadzean.

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.

Poet Cassidy McFadzean

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25
CASSIDY MCFADZEAN

Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi 2024), Drolleries, shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer, winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Cassidy was born in Regina and currently lives in Toronto.

The poems in Crying Dress, acclaimed poet Cassidy McFadzean’s third collection, explore the multiplicity of meaning that arises from fragmentation, rhythm, competing sounds, and ellipsis. Rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry, these strikingly original poems revel in musicality (rhyme, beat, and alliteration) while deploying puns, idiom, and other forms of linguistic play to create a dissonance that challenges the expected coherence of a poem. 

Poetic Appetizer

In the night my fears crystallize into daggers
My parched tongue wants for water

The factory window gradient blue

A curled spider falls from my hair

I dreamed I wrote a poem in the shape of a star

Poet Aaron Kreuter

Friday, october 25
aaron kreuter

Aaron Kreuter is the author of five books. His poetry collection, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, was a finalist for a 2022 Governor General's Literary Award and was shortlisted for both the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and the 2023 Vine Awards for Jewish Literature. His other books include the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs, the short story collection You and Me, Belonging, and the monograph Leaving Other People Alone: Diaspora, Zionism and Palestine in Contemporary Jewish Fiction. His latest book is a collection of seven and a half linked stories, Rubble Children. Aaron lives in Toronto and teaches at Trent University.