Two special events!
Patrick Lane launches his collection Washita at Open Space on November 2
and Tracy Hamon reads as part of the Victoria Writers Festival. details here.
Upcoming readings
OCTOBER HAS FIVE FRIDAYS AND ROOM ON THIS PAGE FOR DETAILS ABOUT JUST FOUR OF THEM. SO... CLICK HERE
to find out about our Friday, October 31 reading with Governor General’s Award nominee ARLEEN PARÉ and RICARDO STERNBERG.
Yvonne Blomer
Friday, October 3, 2014
PALIMPSEST POETRY NIGHT with YVONNE BLOMER, ARIEL GORDON
& PATRICIA YOUNG
Yvonne Blomer was born in Zimbabwe and came to Canada when she was two years old. Her first collection a broken mirror, fallen leaf was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Yvonne has also published two chap books and is the co-editor of Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013) out of the Planet Earth Poetry reading series, of which she is the Artistic Director. In 2014 her third full collection of poems As if a Raven was released with Palimpsest Press, in it Yvonne explores creation, destruction and beauty through birds and biblical references. yvonneblomer.com
Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways, was launched in spring 2014. Recently, she won Kalamalka Press’s inaugural John Lent Poetry-Prose Award. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
Patricia Young’s Summertime Swamp Love
Patricia Young has won numerous awards for her poetry and short fiction, including the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy LIvesay Award, the CBC Literary Competition, Arc’s Poem of the Year Prize, and the Rooke-Metcalf Award. Her work has twice been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
patriciayoung.ca
Tim Bowling (photo: Bruce Wright)
Friday, October 10, 2014
TIM BOWLING & LAWRENCE FEUCHTWANGER
Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief is Tim Bowling’s twelfth collection of poetry, others of which include The Annotated Bee & Me, Fathom, The Memory Orchard and Selected Poems. He has also published a memoir, four novels (including The Bone Sharps and The Tinsmith) and a creative work on book collecting and poetry entitled In the Suicide’s Library. Bowling lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
Lawrence Feuchtwanger’s Refugee Song
“In Refugee Song, Lawrence Feuchtwanger takes the reader on a psychic journey back to the land of his birth, using sharply etched, taut, visceral poems to provide signposts along the way. Filled with echoes of longing and the ache that accompanies all attempts at return, the poems speak a language that is at once personal and political, held together by mythological strands that create yet another layer in this dense and intense spiritual travelogue.”
— Michael Mirolla (Berlin)
“It’s rare to find a first collection of poems so layered with consequence and intoxicating metaphor. Feuchtwanger’s account of his return visit to South Africa ‘to unbury the dead’ is exquisite and excruciating. This is an elegant and substantial new voice.”
— Betsy Warland (Breathing the Page – Reading the Act of Writing)
Jane Munro
Friday, October 17, 2014
JANE MUNRO &
SUSAN PADDON
Plus a workshop on Saturday with Jane Munro. Details here.
Jane Munro's poetry has received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award and the Macmillan Prize for Poetry and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award. Blue Sonoma is her sixth collection, a wise and embodied collection of dreamscapes, sutras and prayer poems from a writer at her peak.
In Blue Sonoma, Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called “the gifts reserved for age.” A beloved partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s is at the heart of this book, and his “battered blue Sonoma” is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. janemunro.com
Susan Paddon
Susan Paddon reads from Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths. www.brickbooks.ca
Susan Paddon was born and grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario, attended McGill and Concordia in Montreal, and lived overseas in Paris and London before settling in Margaree, Nova Scotia. Her poems have appeared in Arc, CV2, The Antigonish Review and Geist among others.
Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths is a book-length series of poems written from the perspective of a daughter who reads Chekhov obsessively while spending a spring and summer caring for her mother, who is dying from pulmonary fibrosis. Through the prism of the relationships in Chekhov’s work and life an honest, intimate, and even occasionally humorous portrayal of the energy we put into each other’s lives through deterioration and suffering.
John Barton’s Polari
Friday, October 24, 2014
JOHN BARTON &
JOANNA LILLEY
John Barton’s eleven books of poetry and six chapbooks include Polari, (Goose Lane 2014), For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2012) and Balletomane: The Program Notes of Lincoln Kirstein (JackPine, 2012). He lives in Victoria, where he edits The Malahat Review.
Read more about Polari on the Goose Lane website.
Joanna Lilley is the author of The Fleece Era (Brick Books, 2014). Originally from Britain, Joanna lives in Whitehorse, Yukon. Her short fiction collection, The Birthday Books, will be published by Hagios Press in 2015.
The Fleece Era is Joanna Lilley’s first book of poems: a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate.