online readings fridays in june 2020

open mic as usual — click here between tuesday and Friday noon to sign up

UPCOMING READINGS

friDAY, june 5, 2020

kim goldberg

Kim Goldberg is the author of eight books of poetry and nonfiction. Her surreal and absurdist poems and fables have appeared in magazines and anthologies in North America and abroad. Her first poetry collection, Ride Backwards on Dragon, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Red Zone, a collection of poems on urban homelessness, has been taught in university literature courses. In 2016 she released Undetectable, her haibun journey through a lifetime of Hepatitis C. Her earlier nonfiction books were published by New Star Books and Harbour Publishing. Kim holds a degree in biology from the University of Oregon and is an avid bird-watcher and field naturalist. Before turning to poetry, she was a freelance journalist covering environmental issues in publications such as Canadian Geographic, Nature Canada, This Magazine, Georgia Straight, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, BBC Wildlife Magazine and numerous other magazines in Canada and abroad. Originally from Oregon, Kim and her family came to Canada in the 1970s as Vietnam War resisters. She lives on unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC), where she is known for creating poem galleries in vacant storefronts and staging guerrilla poetry happenings in weedy waysides.

Devolution is Kim Goldberg’s eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldberg’s canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.

friDAY, june 12, 2020

m.c. warrior

BioBorn in England and educated there and at UBC, M.C. Warrior worked for over thirty years at the sharp end of production in B.C., as a logger and commercial fisherman. He has also worked as a union organiser, an environmental campaigner, and an historian. His new book Disappearing Minglewood Blues contains reflections on his experience working on the coast and the political meaning of work, as well as observations on topics ranging from Buddhism to Ovid in the afterlife. His poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies as well as in a chapbook, Quitting Time, published by McLeod Books in 1978.

Disappearing Minglewood Blues is available through your local bookshop or directly from the publisher:
Mother Tongue Publishing

friDAY, june 19, 2020

daniela elza

Daniela Elza’s poetry collections are the weight of dew (2012), the book of It (2011), and milk tooth bane bone (2013). Her poems have won numerous contests and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology multiple times. Her essay Bringing the Roots Home was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. Her essay Is this an accident or an illness? was shortlisted for the 2019 Event Non-fiction Contest. Daniela is used to crossing borders. She immigrated to Canada in 1999. the broken boat  (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2020) is her fourth poetry collection. 

In the broken boat, Elza deftly builds a raft of questions to stay afloat amidst the breakage of things. The end of a twenty-year marriage mirrors subtler fragmentations in our world. How to survive this loss of meaning, this “wintering through”? The intricacies of light, nature, water, absences glint through grief to astonish and lift the heart into understanding again; transforming and coupling the deeper self with the soulful eros/ions of our world. 

“In the broken boat, Daniela Elza explores the unraveling of a relationship as it is truly experienced: not a tidy narrative of good and bad, but an undulating, multifaceted journey through grief, with no real beginning or end. These poems shatter and shine like river light.”
—Rob Taylor, author of The News.

friDAY, june 26, 2020

arleen paré

Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer. She has six collections of poetry, two of which are cross-genre. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC Award for Poetry and has won a Golden Crown Award for Lesbian Poetry, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Lake of Two Mountains. Her latest poetry collection, Earle Street, was released by Talonbooks in Spring, 2020.  She lives with her partner of forty years in Victoria on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

Planet Earth Poetry is pleased to announce that, through a generous gift from Lorna Crozier, we have two sets of numbered limited edition prints of Patrick Lane’s original work from the early 1980s that we will be offering for sale as of March 15, 2020.

Prints are $250 each, payable to Planet Earth Poetry. Shipping costs will be the responsibility of the purchaser. The prints are unframed (protected by a plastic sleeve) and are 15 x 22 inches. Order and pay by e-transfer in an email to Planet Earth Poetry. Please indicate which print or prints you wish to purchase in the email body and use the subject line Lane Prints.  

All proceeds from this sale will go toward the on-going work of Planet Earth Poetry.
Thanks to DC Reid for the images of the prints that are posted.