The Planet Earth Poetry reading series is a launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not. It is a place where words are most important. A venue in which all manner of poets and writers are welcome; a place for excellence, innovation, collaboration, diverse projects and experiments. The evening begins at 7:30 with an open mic, followed by a featured reader(s). Planet Earth Poetry is located at Hillside Coffee and Tea, 1633 Hillside Ave (across from Bolen Books). Between 7 and 7:15, put your name in the hat to read at open mic. Planet Earth Poetry acknowledges with respect that we read and write on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.
summer 2019
Rebecca Păpucaru
FRIDAY, june 21, 2019
REBECCA PĂPUCARU & EMILY DAVIDSON
Rebecca Păpucaru was awarded the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry for her first collection, The Panic Room, which was also a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English: “Philosophical, funny and forensic in reaching the heart” George Elliott Clarke. “Fran Lebowitz meets T.S. Eliot” Jacob Scheier.
Emily Davidson
Emily Davidson is a writer from Saint John, New Brunswick, who has spent the last ten years living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her poetry has appeared in publications including Arc, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Poetry is Dead, Room, subTerrain, and The Best Canadian Poetry 2015. Her fiction has appeared in Grain and Maisonneuve. Emily holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and works as an editor for a content marketing agency.
Laura Williamson and Liz Breslin
FRIDAY, july 19, 2019
laura williamson & Liz Breslin
These two poets, who work both in the written and spoken forms, met in Wanaka on New Zealand’s South Island a decade ago and have been friends and mutual supporters ever since. Laura Williamson, born in Quebec and raised in British Columbia, has spent twenty years writing herself into the stories and landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand, while still keeping a compass on home. Liz Breslin, now also of New Zealand, writes back beyond her birthplace in the UK to her roots in Poland and Ireland, as well as keeping a satirical eye on the here and now. Writing their roots, Liz and Laura have developed voices as distinct as their accents, yet both continually return to a similar question – what, and where, is home?
A little bit more about the poets:
A widely published poet and columnist, Laura Williamson is the co-writer of The Blue Moments Project song and spoken word cycle, an exploration in music and words of what it is to be foreign. She is also the former editor of Spoke, a national New Zealand mountain bike magazine and the general manager of the Festival of Colour biennial festival of arts and ideas. Laura’s first book, The Bike and Beyond: Life on Two Wheels in Aotearoa New Zealand, is out now as part of the BWB Text series from Bridget Williams Books. www.laurawilliamson.co.nz
Liz Breslin’s first collection of poems, Alzheimer’s and a Spoon, was published by Otago University Press in 2017 and listed as one of the NZ Listener’s Top 100 books. Her poems are journaled in Best New Zealand Poems 2017, Landfall, the Café Reader, the Spinoff, Poetry NZ Yearbook and other places. She also writes plays, stories, reviews, articles and a fortnightly column—Thinking Allowed— for the Otago Daily Times. She’ll be a resident writer in Krakow UNESCO City of Literature in September and October 2019. Liz was second runner up in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Slam in Wellington, did a spoken word piece and a collated-audience-response poem at the 2016 TEDx Queenstown and came third in the Charles Causley Trust International Poetry Competition the same year. www.lizbreslin.com
You can also look at some of our social media links - YouTube and Facebook for our poetry project, Poetic Justice:
Youtube link.
Facebook link.
Laura Ritland’s East and West
FRIDAY, august 16, 2019
laura ritland & jennifer zilm
Laura Ritland is a poet, teacher, critic, and scholar living in Berkeley, California. Her debut collection, East and West, was published with Véhicule Press in 2018—and both nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
East and West, Laura Ritland’s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view. Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegiac without being maudlin, East and West explores what Ritland calls the “middle ground” of childhood, family, diaspora, and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives. Ritland takes the measure of herself in one of the most distinctive and beautifully turned styles in Canadian poetry.
Jennifer Zilm’s The Missing Field
Jennifer Zilm is the author of The Missing Field (Guernica 2018) and Waiting Room (Book*hug 2013). She is a failed biblical scholar, an archivist and public librarian. She is a Surrey girl in exile in East Vancouver.
Jennifer Zilm's second poetry collection, The Missing Field, concerns themes of translation, preservation and the engagement with the transitory documents of everyday life—whether a snapshot of a Vancouver bus, postcards from the Middle East, lecture notes on Euripides, a van Gogh museum catalogue or marginalia in a water-damaged collection of Rilke poems. The missing field is an imaginative space where all the documents lost to time can be reimagined. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award.