october 14
Frances Boyle (Sponsored by Susan Olding)

Frances Boyle’s most recent book is Openwork and Limestone, her third poetry collection. Previous books include This White Nest, a poetry collection, Tower, a novella, and Seeking Shade, an award-winning short story collection. Her writing has been published internationally. Raised on the prairies, Frances has long lived in Ottawa.

In Frances Boyle’s powerful vision, the rituals of contemporary women are seen through the lens of Celtic warrior queens, and goddesses. The natural and created worlds are a source of awe and strength, a reverie that engages the brutality of history and prehistory, and the joys. Openwork and Limestone simultaneously turns inward and outward, telling our collective human story so that it feels like an intimate family history. Openwork and Limestone is a finely wrought and potent new poetry collection.

@francesboyle19 (on both Twitter and Instagram)
Website www.francesboyle.com

Poetic Appetizer
A sapling sprouts from a rotting stump,
severed half of a two-trunked oak. The tall twin
that remains cradles the new. Sharp scent
like a snuffed candle end.

october 14
Katherine Lawrence (Sponsored by anonymous)

Saskatoon writer Katherine Lawrence has published five poetry collections, most recently, Black Umbrella (Turnstone Press, 2022). Her poetry has been published across the country and attracted many awards and nominations along the way. She is a former writer-in-residence with Saskatoon Public Library and holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan.

Black Umbrella offers a bold portrait of family breakdown through the lens of a child, a teenager, and later as an adult who approaches love with wariness and longing. These poems speak of long-held secrets, strained loyalties, love, loss, and the courage required to embrace happiness through the thickening underbrush of adulthood.

A tough and tender poetic memoir, Black Umbrella shares a compelling view of the contemporary family in transition.

katherinelawrence.net

Poetic Appetizer
From “In Over My Head”

I twist, buck, kick free,
gasp air, wake to face
a vision that feels
like gospel prophecy:
I cannot save
my beautiful mother.

OCTOBER 21

zoe dickinson (sponsored by Rhonda ganz)

Zoe Dickinson is a poet and bookseller from Victoria, British Columbia. Her poetry is rooted in the Pacific coastline, with a focus on local ecology and human relationships with nature. She has been published in literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first chapbook, Public Transit, was published in 2015 by Leaf Press, and her second chapbook, intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbook competition (available at ravenchapbooks.ca). She is a manager at Russell Books and the Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.

The littoral zone in a coastal ecosystem ranges from the high-tide mark to the subtidal area, and is defined by the presence of sunlight at the sediment level. This zone of alternating intervals of submergence and exposure is home to abundant life due to plentiful oxygen and nutrients. On the rocky shores of the Juan de Fuca strait, littoral zone inhabitants withstand crashing waves and constantly changing conditions, as the tides submerge and uncover their habitat.

From the tough holdfasts of a kelp forest to the precise angle of a limpet shell, intertidal creatures are adapted to survive everything the Pacific Ocean can throw at them. An incredible diversity of life thrives in every possible nook and cranny. It is this dynamic world-between-the-tides that spawned these poems.

Instagram: @zoe.ida.dickinson
Facebook: @zoe.ida.dickinson

Poetic appetizer (from Nudibranch)
well, that’s one way to deal with fear:
instead of getting harder,
cast off the shell
become all soft underbelly
expose every bit of glowing skin
and dare the world to take a bite

what is armour
but participation
with the predator?

october 21
Poetic Opener – Michelle Poirier Brown

Michelle Poirier Brown is an internationally published poet and performer living on unceded syilx territory in Vernon, BC. She is nêhiyaw-iskwêw and a citizen of the Métis Nation. Her debut book of poems You Might Be Sorry You Read This was published in 2022 by the University of Alberta Press and her chapbook Intimacies was published recently released by Jack Pine Press. Her poem “Wake” won PRISM international’s Earle Birney Prize in 2019. The song cycle, "The Length of a Day” (Jeffrey Ryan, composer), premiered in 2021. Michelle’s work has appeared in Arc, CV2, The Greensboro Review, Grain, Emrys Journal, Vallum, and several anthologies. A feminist activist, Michelle won a landmark human rights case establishing reasonable accommodation in the workplace for breastfeeding women. Now retired from careers as a speech writer, conflict analyst, and federal treaty negotiator, she has taken up birdwatching.

october 28
Tāriq malik (sponsored by the Writers Union of Canada)

Vancouver-based author Tāriq Malik has worked across poetry, fiction, and art for the past four decades to distill immersive, compelling and original narratives. He is the author of short stories (Rainsongs of Kotli), a novel (Chanting Denied Shores) and now a debut poetry collection (Exit Wounds) by Caitlin Press. 

What does it mean to feel at home? In his ground-breaking debut Exit Wounds, Canadian poet Tariq Malik weaves together history and myth with his own family’s experiences of immigration to uncover what it truly means to belong. Malik’s work will resonate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with a dominant monoculture… a defiant triumph of the plurality of minority experiences—a poetic chorus of immigrants and their descendants coming home to the truth and power of their many worlds.

Poetic Appetizer
…Claiming they have no fresh tears to shed the professional mourners are the first to go….
…The frock belonged to a monkey who bit the show master in the crotch and was never seen again…
…And so my distant beloved and land I dwell a neglected night country where someone once buried my moon while another stole my constellations…
…How Our experiences have transformed Us come and witness how We are now Bears Beavers Loons Muskrats Ravens Salmons Turtles Whales Wolves reclaiming reforming rebuilding Turtle Island in all its seven directions.

october 28
poetic opener – clare sharpe

Clare Sharpe is a graduate of the University of Victoria Creative Writing and Cultural Resource Management program. She trained and worked as a newspaper reporter in Scotland, and in Canada, and is now a museum exhibit designer and webmaster. Her work has been published in the Inner Harbour Review, and Geist magazine. She is grateful to be heard.