Friday, september 8
ALL-open-mic fundraiser

Join us for our traditional beginning-of-the-season all-open-mic fundraiser! We’ll be selling gently used books for $5 each. All proceeds from the book sale will go towards keeping us going, so bring some cash and your reading glasses!

And as always, we ask that you bring a poem by someone other than you to read at the open mic. It could be something from a favourite poet, a poem that has inspired or moved you, or simply a poem that you think the rest of us need to hear. Please note that our usual open mic rules (max 3 minutes/one poem) apply!

Would you like to donate books for us to sell on September 16? Please contact Nancy Issenman.

Friday, september 15
robert bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst is winner of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, trained initially in the sciences at MIT but has made his career in the humanities. He is also an officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of two honorary doctorates. 

In The Ridge, Robert Bringhurst offers a work of nonfiction in poetic form, intensely focused on the ecological past, present and future of the West Coast of Canada. At the book’s heart is a long poem, “The Ridge,” in which Bringhurst makes meticulous use of scientific language and, with a poet’s perspective and precision, translates abstract concepts into tangible and devastating imagery. Beautiful, profound and insightful, The Ridge reflects the author’s reputation as one of Canada’s most esteemed poets.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Language Poem”

What interests me most is the meaning
that’s here to begin with: the meaning
that being is made of and is. It evolves
within and amongst things….

September 15 poetic opener
sarah jeannine booth

Sarah Jeannine Booth is a poet from Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her writing has appeared in print publications by Sunday Mornings at the River, The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, and Humana Obscura, among others. Her first collection - Topophilia: A Strong Sense of Place, is available worldwide and explores themes of love and connection. She mostly writes in and about nature.

Raven Chapbooks poets Ian Thomas (left), Marlene Grand Maître and Susan McCaslin

September 22
raven chapbooks launch

Born in Vancouver, Ian Thomas is a biologist and poet with a lifelong passion for the ecosystems and wildlife of the BC coast. He currently works for the Ancient Forest Alliance, a non-profit that works to protect BC’s endangered old-growth forests. Green Islands is his first published book. 

Marlene Grand Maître’s poetry chapbook Cancer’s Rogue Season was published in 2020 by Frog Hollow Press. Her work has also appeared in many literary journals, and in ten anthologies. She has won Freefall magazine’s poetry contest, and the Federation of BC Writers’ poetry competition. A poem was longlisted for Best Canadian Poetry 2011, and she has had a poem nominated for a National Magazine Award by Prairie Fire. Her poem “Vanishing Point” was chosen by the League of Canadian Poets for Poem in Your Pocket as part of National Poetry Month, 2022. Her work has also been published in the LCP’s 2022 chapbook anthology Leap. She is on the Board of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series Society in Victoria, BC.

Susan McCaslin, who lives outside Fort Langley, taught English and Creative Writing at Douglas College for twenty-three years. She has published sixteen volumes of poems and has a new volume forthcoming in Sept. of this year titled Consider. Susan’s central passions are walking in nature and receiving poems.

Green Islands by Ian Thomas
Green Islands presents a thrilling fusion of the finely observed and the visionary poetic. The poems here are precise in their location, exuberant in their images, and compelling in their strength. Thomas’s language, sinuous and surprising, is not imposed on the landscape but rather seems to rise from it like a blessing. In a voice reminiscent of Ted Hughes in River, Thomas immerses us in a world of presence, flow, and transcendence.

Wild Kin by Marlene Grand Maître
These orca-ridden west coast poems, suffused with elegiac longing and imperilled bodies, speak of our marrow-deep need for connection with the natural world, and the consequences of our estrangement from it, and from our own animal bodies.

Sentient Stones by Susan McCaslin
Sentient Stones explores how all things on earth and in the cosmos are alive and intimately interconnected. The sequence honours stones from Susan’s childhood, stones in her daily life, stones from her travels, and stones from history and mythology. The sequence of poems opens with “Mon Amie,” in which a polished ammonite stone containing a prehistoric creature lies curled in a spiral form and becomes the poet’s soul companion. Coming full circle in the last poem, “Ammonite’s Song,” the ammonite sings her own poem.

AT NEW HORIZONS IN james bay, september 22 at 2pm
PEP IN THE AFTERNOON WITH raven chapbooks poets

All three Raven Chapbooks poets will also be reading at our New Horizons event! Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm. 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.

September 29
D.a. Lockhart (sponsored by the writers’ union of canada)

D.A. Lockhart is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Devil in the Woods (Brick Books 2019) and Tukhone: Where the River Narrows and the Shores Bend (Black Moss Press 2020). His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2019, TriQuarterly, ARC Poetry Magazine, Grain, Belt, and the Malahat Review among many. He is a Turtle Clan member of Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Lenape), a registered member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and currently resides at the south shore of Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor,ON-Detroit, MI) and Pelee Island.

North of Middle Island journeys to the southernmost tip of the territories held by Canada. The first section of the book captures, in verse, the spirit of the relatively isolated, sparsely populated community of Pelee Island. The pieces explore contemporary Indigenous experience in the natural and built environments of the island and surrounding waters.

The second section is comprised of an epic poem entitled “Piper” that tells, in traditional Anglo-Saxon style, a new Lenape myth of how Deerwoman (Ahtuhxkwe) comes to Pelee Island. The events of this epic tale are loosely based on the infamous professional wrestler and actor Rowdy Roddy Piper’s time on the island, and the events of Wrestlemania XII, Piper’s notorious “Backlot Brawl” with fellow wrestler Goldust (Nkuli Punkw).

Poetic Appetizer
from “Screaming at Foxes Above Fish Point”

We drive through the island
thick night, between darkness
that we cut at right angles,
with our car along gravel roads,
and we scathe the shadows
for foxes, crystalline eye flare
in the shadows beyond
our knives’ edge. We search
until we collide with land’s end.

September 29 poetic opener
Catherine st denis

Catherine St. Denis (she/her) lives, writes, sings, teaches, and parents on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples. Her work recently appeared in Rattle and The Malahat Review. She was a finalist for PEN Canada's 2022 New Voices Award and her poems have been shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s poetry contest, CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize, and The Toronto Arts and Letters Club Award.