Poet Kate Braid

friday, may 02
kate braid

Kate Braid’s awards include For the Remarkable Woman of the Arts and Pandora’s Collective BC Mentor’s Awards in Vancouver, and for poetry, the Pat Lowther and Vancity Book Prizes. She has also been writer in residence at Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico. Kate has written many books of poetry and creative non-fiction including two memoirs of her fifteen years as a carpenter, Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World, and Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman. She currently lives on Pender Island and in Victoria, BC.

Her book The Erotics of Cutting Grass is a celebration of life’s later chapters, written with the same unique mix of humour, frankness, and vulnerability Kate’s readers have come to know and love. Join her on this smart, thought-provoking journey that redefines what it means to embrace ageing on your own terms.

Poet Thomas Doerksen

friday, may 02
thomas doerksen

Thomas Doerksen is a poet, philosopher, and scientist based in Victoria, British Columbia. Motivated by the climate crisis and growing wealth inequality, his poetry balances conceptual novelty, musicality, and a compassionate attention for human and non-human alike.

Through the Cities and the Woods juxtaposes images from nature with those of postindustrial dystopia. It compares some—who make the daunting attempt to make connections in the face of crushing daily overwhelm—and others—who live automatically and unquestioningly, unconcerned with imagination and wonder. It looks for sparks among the rhythms of routine to recuperate us from entropy and show the world hidden behind our assumptions.

Poetic Appetizer

“Prizes”

On an autumn porch,
a squirrel stuffs walnuts
into my boots’ toes,
waiting to fill a winter belly.

It takes some time to remove
the walnut from the boot,
and I can’t find the other nut
that the squirrel buried

under the basil
until next spring.

friday, may 09

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday, May 09 for award-winning poet Nick Thran, whose collections of poems Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Nick lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller. 

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 Nick Thran

FRIDAY, may 09
nick thran

Nick Thran’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Nick lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller. 

In his fourth collection, Existing Music, Nick Thran blends praxis, experience and imagination together to make poems about breathing and singing, Potato World and the metaverse, translation and paying homage.  Riffs, celebrations, collaborations, distortions and meditations—these poems explore the companionship of wistful music. Existing Music lingers in the euphonic— whether intentional, unexpected, or beneath layers of silence.  

Poet Laurence Hutchman

FRIDAY, may 09
laurence hutchman

Laurence Hutchman grew up in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Université de Montreal and was an English Literature professor at the Université de Moncton for 23 years. Hutchman has published 13 books of poetry, co-edited the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, and edited two volumes of In the Writers’ Words.

Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2020 gathers together five decades of poetry by this accomplished Canadian poet. He invites us on a poetic odyssey, beginning with his travels to Europe, eventful times in Montreal, residence in New Brunswick, and finally, his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time.

Poetic Appetizer

From “Lines Written on a Terrace”
excerpt from Laurence Hutchman's book Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems: 1968-2020 

If you want to practice poems,
put the spoon into your mouth.
Feel your lips around it,
sounds, shapes, textures, flavours.
Feel how it nourishes you
with its meats, vegetables, and fruit,
how it takes them from the earth into you.

Dr. Lucía M. Polis

FRIDAY, may 16
Dr. Lucía M. Polis

Dr. Lucía M. Polis, born in the imaginary country of U.S.S.R., is a neuroqueer poet, translator, editor, and founder of JLRB Press. Since 1996, she has written more than 1,000 poems, some of which appeared in her collections Granville, We Were Hateful People, and The Love of a Good Man.

Released for the first time under its author’s true name as a celebration of her transgender identity and three decades of poetry, this book contains an epic queer poem of 652 lines (give or take) that embodies an exuberant and unholy union between T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and J. F. Shade’s “Pale Fire” and examines the vagaries of homosocial affinity, homosexual desire, and transgender metamorphosis, their seeming impossibility, their historiography, and their erasure, prompted by the disaffection of a man.

Poet Jes Battis

FRIDAY, may 16
jes battis -
(event sponsored by The League of Canadian Poets)

Jes Battis teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They’ve published their writing in The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Strange Horizons. They are the author of the Occult Special Investigator series, the Parallel Parks series and The Winter Knight.

This collection of fifty poems offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code. 

Poetic Appetizer

"I need to tell you,

please listen, there's no heaven or

hell, only this bewildering dance floor."

Poet Arleen Paré

FRIDAY, may 23
arleen Paré

Arleen Paré, based in Victoria, BC, has written nine collections of poetry. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC Award for Poetry and won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry.

In September 2020, Arleen Paré’s nineteen-year-old grandson moved into the basement of her home to attend courses nearby. After suffering a bout of severe anxiety and depression, he was forced to drop out of his second-year computer science program after one month. In an effort to quell her own feelings of helplessness and growing anxiety about the situation, Paré turned to poetry. Encrypted is an honest and illuminating narrative of a life arrested and a home haunted by grief.

Poetic Appetizer

we make of ourselves how we move through the world

I have made of myself a long river of words

a plain flatlands meander of words looping back

looping ahead

the Old Testament posits the Word

words being the main way we open and close

take me away

bring me back

night comes

and the sky stops in its heedless rotation

if you have made of yourself a door

in time

can you make it to open

even halfway

Poet Estlin McPhee

FRIDAY, may 23
estlin mcphee

Estlin McPhee is a writer and librarian who lives on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Estlin is the author of the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018); for many years, they co-organized the queer reading series REVERB. In Your Nature is Estlin’s debut poetry collection.

Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.

Poetic Appetizer

Excerpt from “Boy”

That tug between bodies that moves my mouth
like a bridle. You weren’t what I thought 
would pull me. But then neither of us the boy 
the other expected. Boys to me are shapeshifters, 
familiars, beloved. Like the boy in the mirror—
shadow who is so like me 
except that he can leave when he needs to, 
turn himself into tree branch 
or disappear down the long corridor
within my own reflection.

Poet Daniel Maluka

FRIDAY, MAY 30
daniel maluka

Daniel Maluka, a self-taught Toronto artist and writer, merges Afrocentric and surrealist influences in his internationally recognized art. His debut poetry collection Unwashed was featured in CBC’s "37 Most Anticipated Poetry Books for Spring 2024." Maluka's work explores subconscious depths through captivating visuals and visceral, image-rich poetry.

"Unwashed" is a remarkable debut that highlights Daniel Maluka’s unique voice, blending personal stories with broader social and historical contexts. The collection resonates with anyone caught between childhood and adulthood, personal and cultural identity, or dreams and reality. Haunting yet thought-provoking, Maluka’s poetry meditates on carrying the weight of personal and collective history while striving for freedom. A must-read for those seeking poetry that both moves the soul and challenges the mind.

Poetic Appetizer

”birds of prey” 

do you remember the days we spent
your florescent room listening
to david attenborough 
his 
voice escaping through smoke
you know, hawks are the only birds of prey that hunt in packs?

cloaked in red you snorted in agreement

Poet Lynn Tait

FRIDAY, MAY 30
Lynn tait

SPONSORED BY THE WRITERS’ UNION OF CANADA

Lynn Tait resides in Sarnia, ON. Author of You Break It You Buy It, published in various journals and in over 100 North American anthologies, she’s a member of The Ontario Poetry Society, the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers Union of Canada and Not The Rodeo Poets.

A collection of elegies railing against toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists, these poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges and the pandemic. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.

Poetic Appetizer

“Measures of Forgiveness”

a yard sale of porcelain hearts,
all cracked,
five cent apologies,
fragile in the hand.
You break it you buy it
no longer applies.