BC Poetry 2016: An Introduction

Dorothy Livesay

In late 2013 I was asked to judge the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, given to the top book of poetry by a BC author published in a given year. The turn-around time for judging was quick, but I figured I could handle it. After all, there couldn't be more than 15 books in the running, 20 at most. I could think of six or eight titles off hand and figured maybe twice as many as that were out there, unknown to me.

Then a few weeks later two large boxes, containing more than 50 books, arrived on my doorstep. Needless to say I was stunned, and had a far busier winter of reading than anticipated. And yes, there were a few duds in the bunch, but far fewer than I expected. I was struck by the depth and range of poetry being written in this province, and by how little of it got any media coverage at all. I came away from the experience with at least a dozen books that had some kind of memorable impact on me, all of which I would never have heard of or read if not for my position as competition judge.

That fact has niggled at me over the intervening two years, but LIFE has had its all-caps ways of keeping me too preoccupied to do anything about it. This April, though, my family and I will be celebrating National Poetry Month in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where I will be writer-in-residence at the Al Purdy A-frame. The A-frame Association asks writers-in-residence to perform some sort of community outreach during their stay - usually visits to local schools or libraries, or some 1-on-1 mentorship. I am going to do such work myself, but I also thought that - as the first BC writer-in-residence at the A-frame - I should put a little work into the poetry community in my own province, as well.

So, the idea of the "BC Poetry 2016" celebration was born. Throughout April I will be featuring a forthcoming, or just published, poetry book each day (Monday to Saturday - we'll rest right alongside the Lord on Sundays). There will also be the occasional Fall 2015 title, which may have been overlooked at that time. All of the books will be written by BC authors or published by BC publishers (or, in a great number of cases, both). If you've arrived late to the party, you can catch up on what's already been posted here.

Though it's unlikely this will carry over to 2017 or 2018 editions (I doubt the A-frame will have me back!), I hope this month of features will encourage fans of local poetry to dig deeper than the biggest two or three poetry publishers and take a look at what's happening at the smaller-small presses - you'll be rewarded for the extra effort.

Participating Publishers

Anvil Press
BookThug
Caitlin Press
Leaf Press
McClelland and Stewart
Mother Tongue Publishing
New Star Books
Nightwood Editions
The Porcupine's Quill
Quattro Books
Talonbooks
University of Alberta Press

Some publishers were contacted and did not reply.

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

Coming Soon... The Cyclist!

I have an essay coming out on Wednesday with Big Truths magazine and, well, those folks don't mess around when it comes to promotion. I thought that Ooligan Press' promotion of my poem in their "Alive at the Center" anthology, complete with hand-drawn recreation of my author photo, was impressive, but Big Truths (and it's sister magazine Little Fiction) might have them beat.

The essay is about a motorcycle accident Marta was in when we were living in Zambia in 2013. Needless to say, it was a harrowing moment in both of our lives. The cover image (yes, my online essay has a cover - see above) and promotional trailer (yes, my online essay has a promotional trailer - see below) manage to take that harrowing moment and crank the harrow-meter to 11.

I'll post a link when the essay goes up on Wednesday, which gives you four days to get adequately pre-harrowed. Also, make sure you check out Little Fiction/Big Truth's fiction and non-fiction archives - there's oh so much good stuff in there.

BC Poetry 2016: "Rough Ground Revisited" by Kate Braid (Caitlin Press)

He Calls Me

Found poem
from a conversation with a female firefighter

Because I don't carry a purse
or wear makeup
 
because I like sports
and am physically fit
 
because I wear a uniform
and the gods didn't make me pretty
 
because I wear boots
and am a firefighter, proud as him,
 
he calls me  Bitch  Broad  Dyke.

I call him  Hey,  Bill.

Who?

Kate Braid has written and co-edited eleven books of prize-winning poetry and non-fiction, most recently a memoir, Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World, and poems, Rough Ground Revisited. In 2015 she was awarded the Vancouver Mayor’s Award for the Literary Arts for leadership in Vancouver’s cultural community.


What?

After publishing her memoir, Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World, it seemed appropriate to release a second edition of her first book of poems. In Rough Ground Revisited, several of the original poems in Covering Rough Ground have been replaced with new ones that explore - in slightly more gritty fashion but still with humour, compassion and a wise eye – Kate's experience as a construction carpenter and the impact of that crucial time in her life.


When?

Arrived August 15th, 2015.


Where?

Book Launches: N/A.

Purchases: From the Caitlin Press website or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Exploring in a more gritty fashion.

Caitlin Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Twenty Seven Stings" by Julie Emerson (New Star Books)

Excerpt from "Fire"

With fire, a man faces the enemy.
It’s fear he offers, no screen
of scarlet tulips. A samurai’s
sword compels the foe to face
the man, the knight with a spiked mace,
no blooming allium bulb.
The crossbowman can rupture
class, accused of cowardice
for not getting close to his rival.
Militiamen throng the fields,
muskets firing, nothing natural
as hundreds of blazing hawthorne buds.
Poppies turn blood-red,
pilots fly their own fire.
Now, beside a potted geranium
at his desk, a man with a screen is god.
He steers a dragonfly in another
country he’s never seen, a mother
calls her teenaged son — the end,
unmanned. Songs efface the boom:
bam.

Illustration by Roxanna Bikadoroff

Who?

Julie Emerson is a writer and multimedia artist who lives in Vancouver and on Mayne Island, BC. She is the author of The Herons of Stanley Park (with photographer Martin Passchier, 2013) and A Hundred Days: A Botanical Novel (2012), and won the 2013 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Competition. Her artwork is exhibited in galleries around Vancouver.


What?

Twenty Seven Stings is a suite of seventeen poems inspired by the cultural histories and military strategies that have led us into wars throughout history, from sixth century BCE China to Alexander the Great to contemporary American drone warfare.

Drawing on these and other well–known conflicts, Twenty Seven Stings engages various aspects of war, including the rules of warfare; the unsung roles of women as pawns or inspirations or lures; the seasons of battle, the landscape, and the lack of food as elemental factors; and the use of poisons and bees as weapons — the title poem refers to the bee–stings required to kill an enemy, according to Pliny's Natural History. Julie Emerson's powerfully understated verse reimagines human consciousness, and the ways our psychological needs, our territorial instincts, and our propensity for violence inhabit and animate the state of war.

Twenty Seven Stings is illustrated by renowned Vancouver illustrator Roxanna Bikadoroff.


When?

Arrived November 11th, 2015.


Where?

Book Launches: Done and gone!

Purchases: The New Star website, or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Reimagining human consciousness.

New Star Books * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "The Red Files" by Lisa Bird-Wilson (Nightwood Editions)

Blood Sisters

between learning and laundry
backs against redbrick building
legs crossed Indian-style
Agnes tells Leona
“you should marry my brother”

they pinky swear
but it’s not set
until Agnes swipes
a kitchen knife
and they pledge in blood
to be sisters forever
pressing their palms together
a stick red promise

teacher catches them out
of sight behind the rectory
pulls their hair
flushed and inflamed
she pinches their legs
to hear them squawk
makes Agnes kneel
to lick Leona’s hand wound
a viscous curious bloom
clean, before sending them
to scrub floors
on prayer-bruised knees

Who?

Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Cree-Metis writer from Saskatchewan whose writing has appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including Grain, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review, Geist, kimiwan, cîhcêwêsin and Best Canadian Essays. She is the author of the novel Just Pretending (Coteau Books, 2013). Bird-Wilson lives in Saskatoon, SK.


What?

This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations.

Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government's complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which are divided into “black files" and “red files." In vignettes as clear as glass beads, her poems offer affection to generations of children whose presence within the historic record is ghostlike, anonymous and ephemeral.

The collection also explores the larger political context driving the mechanisms that tore apart families and cultures, including the Sixties Scoop. It depicts moments of resistance, both personal and political, as well as official attempts at reconciliation: “I can hold in the palm of my right hand / all that I have left: one story-gift from an uncle, / a father's surname, treaty card, Cree accent echo, metal bits, grit— / and I will still have room to cock a fist."

The Red Files concludes with a fierce hopefulness, embracing the various types of love that can begin to heal the traumas inflicted by a legacy of violence.



When?

Arriving May 7th, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: TBA.

Purchases: The Harbour Publishing website, or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Embracing the various types of love.

Nightwood Editions * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "The Names" by Tim Lilburn (McClelland & Stewart)

Rabbit Lake Log House, Where I First Read the Tao

Stove of quarter-inch iron
In a wide grey room facing the opposite
Plunge of the valley, frost on the inner walls, the early Nineties –
Where else to sleep but in front of that cherried blackness,
One sleigh, drifts, and a moon pressed into the metal,
In a winter bag, on a moose-hide rug, waking every few hours
To lay in poplar chunks broken
From the iced pile behind the kitchen.
I’d light a propane lamp later,
Put a kettle on the hottest part of the stove’s plate
For instant and watch white trees come out of dark.
A beautiful woman had left me.
Unskinned stars every night,
The river was frozen a half-mile below
Under animal scratches through snow.
The house was still and stepped back even in late morning,
Horsehair couch, some sort of tiptoedness in the biblical quotations
In glass ovals on the wall; the old logs in the loaned house
Cracked as if they made a boat
Moving across a sea of buoyant cold.

Who?

Tim Lilburn is the author of nine previous books of poetry, including Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, and To the River. His work has received the Governor General’s Award and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. Lilburn is also the author of two essay collections, Living in the World As If It Were Home and Going Home, and the editor of two other influential books on poetics. He teaches at the University of Victoria.


What?

From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition.

The Names is personal and familial archaeology, an extemporal dig giving spectres back to their bodies. With its lines sped up and dazzlingly associative, Tim Lilburn’s cocktail of obsessions – confession, ontology, mystical theology, humour and extreme, fleet, apt weirdness – marches through on full display. He pulls in an even broader cast of characters than his previous collections managed: John Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porete brush past aunts, uncles, and unusual creatures steering the boats of language past fog-draped trees. In Lilburn’s latest collection, we are immersed in a realism of remarkable proportions, as though incandescent memory comprised both texture and text, and combined formed the elemental fibres of a perilous present.


When?

Arrived March 22nd, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: Vancouver launch at Open Space, date TBA.

Purchases: From the McClelland & Stewart website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Cocktail-ing obsessions.

McClelland & Stewart * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Waiting Room" by Jennifer Zilm (BookThug)

elegy, a rain fragment

The rain a silk mesh blanket,
  giddy at a prose poem, a monologue
  of hobos, a tiny leaf
  a prayer of thresholds. Theft under
  your chargeable offense, your diagnosis. Goodbye
                from the boundary shore. If she said
 that to me 

Who?

Vancouver-based Jennifer Zilm received a B.A. and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of British Columbia and was a doctoral fellow at McMaster University, where her (unfinished) dissertation focused on the liturgical and poetic texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the Humber College School for Writers, Zilm’s writing has been published in numerous journals, including Prism International, Prairie Fire, Grain, CV2, The Antigonish Review, Vallum, and Women in Judaism and Poetry. Zilm is the author of two chapbooks: The whole and broken yellows (2013) and October Notebook (2015). Zilm has been a finalist for many contests, including The Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award and CV2's 2-Day Poem Contest. A draft of Waiting Room was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.


What?

Featuring a mélange of styles and forms (including sonnets, erasures, unsent emails, footnotes, session notes, CVs, tweets, and other disparate source materials), Zilm’s engaging and observant writing invites readers to investigate the curious boundaries of various therapeutic terrains-from an exploration of the esoteric world of graduate school, where the subject is religion, to a mash-up of Dante’s vision of purgatory and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), to the improbable written intersections of van Gogh’s doctors and Sylvia Plath’s therapist-subverting, sharing, and repurposing the all-too-familiar vocabularies of psychiatry, dentistry, the Bible, and academia in a humorous investigation into what it means to wait, to be a patient and to be patient, to be a student and to be a teacher, to be a healer and to be healed.

“From dental work to theological discourse, Waiting Room enthralled me. Zilm’s ‘salient’ lines leap or spring with poignancy. She deeply attends to the urgency and meaning of the poem on every level and it’s rare. Brava!” — Betsy Warland


When?

Arrived April 5th, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: Vancouver launch June 2016 (exact date TBA).

Purchases: The BookThug website, at AllLitUp.ca, or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Repurposing the all-too-familiar vocabularies.

BookThug * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "th book" by bill bissett (Talonbooks)

i live in a well

its parshulee
polluted

ths is a deep
image
pome

sumtimez i
remembr
evreething

sumtimez i
remembr
nothing

whats th diffrens

can yu tell

dew yu know

Who?

bill bissett garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the counter-culture movement in Canada and the U.K. In 1964, he founded blewointment press, which published the works of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, among others.

bissett’s charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate sound poetry, chanting and singing, the verve of which is only matched by his prolific writing career—over seventy books of bissett’s poetry have been published.

A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry—eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (“proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling—bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry.

Whether paying tribute to his hometown lunaria or exercising his native tongue dissent, bissett continues to dance upon upon the cutting edge of poetics and performance works.

bill bissett was recently a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV.

Among bissett’s many awards are: The George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize (2003) for peter among th towring boxes / text bites, and the BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize (1993) inkorrect thots.


What?

New poems from Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry, bill bissett. bissett’s innovations in sound poetry shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century.

In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes joy byond binaree constraints if evreething goez what is aneething accepting nihilism lettr texting as an approach 2 heeling sorrow denial.”


When?

Arriving April 21st, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: April 26th, Pyatt Hall (Vancouver).

Purchases: The Talonbooks website, or at your local bookstore. $19.95.


How?

Paying tribute to his hometown lunaria.

Talonbooks * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "The Resumption of Play" by Garry Geddes (Quattro Books)

A Song of Recall

And so it is with longing, you extend a hand
into the mist expecting to take hold of something
lost, perhaps the very thing you’d yearned for

but could not claim, a dream-shape, an unwritten
melody, insistent, that flitted in and out of your days
leaving its residue on your pillow, the faint smear

on an otherwise blank page, a colophon of desire.
You glimpse an apron, blue, with a pale, stitched
hem, a smudge of flour near the generous pocket,

enough to hold for a moment that lost mother
disappearing into the night who might, just might
be yours, wisps of her long dark hair surviving

cancer, surviving the flames, making a mockery
of memory itself, that insatiable canvas needing
to be filled, framed, needing to have occurred.

Who?

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 45 books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies and won more than a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti, and Mario Benedetti.


What?

The gripping title poem of The Resumption of Play, which won the 2015 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, dramatizes the traumatic experience and enduring legacy of Canada’s Indian residential schools. The book is also about coming to terms with grief and loss, including a special elegiac sequence about the poet’s mother, dead at age 35, and another about Pound, Brodsky, Stravinsky and Diaghelev called “On Being Dead in Venice.” This exciting new cornucopia from one of Canada’s premier poets also includes two prison letters from Somalia and lyrics about Virginia Woolf, Bronwen Wallace, misogyny, obstacles to belief, and the healing power of poetry.


When?

Arrived in January 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: Back on March 15th, at Russell Books (Vancouver).

Purchases: At your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Cornucopia-ing.

Quattro Books * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "After All the Scissor Work is Done" by David Fraser (Leaf Press)

The Pick-up Girl

Out of the longest shadows
when the road lay looped and black
he found a girl with a crooked smile
in the headlights of the car.
He picked her up.
She slid into the seat.
She was lipstick, rouge, long legs
and cigarettes, slightly tarnished,
not a lucky coin, and he knew
he was in trouble when
she put her bare feet on the dash.
She flashed some thigh, so he kept
his eyes on the dark ribboned road,
the rocks and brush on either side.
She told him tales of forty pounders,
mornings naked waking on the grass,
how she took the cherries off young boys
and how at night she cried for all the babies
she’d given up. He knew he could’ve
kept her safe, but bought her breakfast,
left on the table a bit of cash
and went to wash his hands.
She took the money,
hit the road, and found
another ride.

Who?

David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island. He is the founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine, since 1997. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, and Tesseracts 18. He has published five collections of poetry: Going to the Well, Running Down the Wind, No Way Easy, Caught in My Throat, Paper Boats, and a collection of short fiction, Dark Side of the Billboard, and On Poetry, a book on poetry and poetics, co-authored with Naomi Beth Wakan. To keep out of trouble he helps develop Nanaimo's spoken-word series, WordStorm. In October 2009 and 2010 he participated in Random Acts of Poetry, a national poetry program that brought poetry to the streets of Canada. David has performed his poetry in British Columbia, Ontario, California, and Switzerland.


What?

The poems in After All the Scissor Work Is Done scrape at the darker shades of human experience.

"Having admired David Fraser's poetry for years as he wonderfully manages to hallow small everyday moments, After All the Scissor Work Is Done came as a surprise. It is as if David has shed a hundred skins, let everything fall away until he could see matters with a naked, raw clarity, speak of things directly and unflinchingly. The sepia of nostalgia creeps like a mist over these poems, yet the sharpness of his memories, imagined or otherwise, keeps the reader from lulling into complacency by asking that we confront, time and time again, our own human frailties and our own mortality. A brave book." - Naomi Beth Wakan


When?

Will arrive at the end of April 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: TBA

Purchases: From the Leaf Press website or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Scraping at the darker shades.

Leaf Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Buoyancy Control" by Adrienne Gruber (BookThug)

Oyster

Drink it slow, says the girl who takes you
on her Vespa along the freeways of Manhattan, who dresses
all in black, face a sharp-eyed cat. Oyster juice
dribbles down her chin and she catches it with a napkin. Can you
taste it? she asks, and you nod, not at all sure what she means.
The ocean, she says. Now close your eyes, and you do.
Sip the salty water, granules of the shell roll around
in your mouth. Nibble the oyster like touching tongues.
Open your eyes. She tilts her head back and pours the fleshy
meat down her throat. A bathtub made of marble, legs stretched
in lukewarm, the girl sprawled against your solid frame. It is this
and every image like it that prevents you from moving forward.
You take a cautious bite, pulp against your teeth. The summer
in Tofino, the afternoon at Long Beach, your face dry and sunburnt.
Find shells and smell their insides. Musky. The girl’s eyes watch
your mouth as you chew small plump bites. You can’t bear
to swallow something so raw, so full of life.

Who?

Adrienne Gruber is the author of the poetry collection This is the Nightmare (2008; shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry) and three chapbooks: Intertidal Zones (2014), Mimic (2012; winner of a bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Everything Water (2011). Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Grain, Event, Arc Poetry Magazine, Poetry is Dead, and Plenitude. She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in poetry, Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest, and twice for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem “Gestational Trail” was awarded first prize in The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015. Gruber lives in Vancouver with her partner Dennis and their two daughters.


What?

Buoyancy Control presents a fascinating culmination of land and sea, mind and body, in linguistic form. Metaphors of oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water (as well as the creatures that inhabit those spaces), swim and swirl their way through Gruber’s languid poems, which are divided into two evocative sections that explore themes of sexuality, sexual identity, and queerness, while confronting the feelings of loss and longing found in relationships, and the chance glimpse into a new life, while still recovering from a painfully failed connection.

Buoyancy Control is an honest, at times humorous, and revealing look inside the mind and body of a woman manoeuvring through experiences of longing, loss, and the fluidity of sexual identity, presented in a powerfully feminist and unapologetic poetic voice, from one of Canada’s most promising young writers.

“Densely, disturbingly erotic, Adrienne Gruber’s Buoyancy Control is not a book for the faint of heart. Gruber’s erotic reach encompasses the world entire, from undersea creatures to the human body of the beloved. No Hallmark sweetness in this collection—here is a fierce, wet, pulsing hunger, though there is an acute sensitivity in these observations, whether of childbirth, cold-water swimming, or other moments of convulsion and transformation so powerful that they transcend intellect. Here are poems that burst like fireworks, ‘all thought blasted into the night sky.’” — Rachel Rose


When?

Arrived April 5th, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: Vancouver launch June 2016 (exact date TBA).

Purchases: The BookThug website, at AllLitUp.ca, or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Culminating land and sea.

BookThug * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Ignite" by Kevin Spenst (Anvil Press)

Guests of Hallucinations

Trees wave over your
arrival in Kitimat, people of
the snow. Your first

job away from home,
a rigger on the rugged coast.
You wear the corkboots

of a hard man, hold
a cigarette aloft as snow-capped
mountains glare.

You hear cries in
the fall of cedars scratching
green out of the sky.

You get a blue and red
tattoo of Mother on your arm.
A stability badge. You cut

notches around anchor
stumps, swing an ax into a tree
screaming verdant. On

the river hundreds of slippery
slivers crosshatch the light into
a finger pointing at you.

So much foreignness,
you wonder where new
ends and you begin.

Who?

Kevin Spenst is the author of Jabbering with Bing Bong and ten chapbooks. He has done a one-man show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival and over a hundred readings across the country. His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry and has appeared in dozens of publications including the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2014. He lives and works in Vancouver, where he's an enthusiastic participant in a number of writing communities.


What?

Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock treatment and coma-induced insulin therapy. Merging memory and medical records, Kevin Spenst recreates his father's life through a cuckoo's nest of styles that both stand as witness and waltz to the interplay between memory, emotion, and all our forms of becoming.


When?

Arrived on April 12th, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: April 20th, 2016, The Heatley (Vancouver) - Tomorrow!!!

Purchases: At your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Powder-kegging.

Anvil Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

Al Purdy Poetry Night - This Friday!

We interrupt the regularly scheduled "BC Poetry 2016" with a related special announcement. This series is, in part, about bringing BC poetry with me to Ontario while I work as the writer-in-residence at the Al Purdy A-frame, so I would be remiss to not take a quick pause to note a great event, and A-frame fundraiser, happening this Friday. The details:

Al Purdy Poetry Night
Friday, April 22nd, 7 PM
Cottage Bistro
4470 Main Street, Vancouver
Featuring: George Bowering, Elizabeth Bachinksy, Raoul Fernandes, Zsuzsi Gartner, Danny Peart, Kate Braid, Wayde Compton and Gillian Jerome
$10 (all proceeds to the A-frame Association)
Poster:

All credit to Danny Peart for organizing this knockout lineup. I'll be missing you all, and cheering you on from Ameliasburgh!

BC Poetry 2016: "Sleeping in Tall Grass" by Richard Therrien (University of Alberta Press)

Salt

There is a light that expires in my mouth.
                     - Georg Trakl
Once there was    —the moment
blasted    blinded
 
Where the tangent looking back 
touches the curve of time we turn

to salt    I re-call 

the glance   Lot’s wife turning in her pastel robes in the pastel desert
watching the pastel city    burn    —Bible Stories for Children
open on my lap   —Lot’s children huddled 
in the corner of my room   listening to the sound
of their mother’s bones
turning to salt

Who?

Poet and editor Richard Therrien has worked at a number of occupations, including landscape labourer, photography instructor, filmmaker, and speech writer. Born and raised on — and a repeated escapee from — the Canadian prairie, he has published across North America and currently works and lives in North Vancouver.


What?

A cycle of poems, Sleeping in Tall Grass takes an unsparing look at a painful, sometimes abusive, yet strangely redemptive family story enfolded within the body of the Canadian prairie itself—at once physical, historical, and metaphysical. These intensely personal poems reflect the complex relationships between sound and space, language and silence. Treating time as more layered than sequential, they reflect a process of organic composition distilled from Therrien's iterative observations and utterances. This is writing that reaches "into the very grain of existence" — a sonorous re-presentation of the human presence on the dispassionate but eternally giving plains.


When?

Arrived in March 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: April 20th, 4 PM, at the Edmonton Poetry Festival (Edmonton) - Two days from now!!

May 7th, 3 PM, The Silk Purse, 1570 Argyle Ave. (West Vancouver).

Purchases: From the University of Alberta Press website or at your local bookstore. $19.95.


How?

Treating time as more layered than sequential.

University of Alberta Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Injun" by Jordan Abel (Talonbooks)

Excerpt from Injun

Who?

Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer currently completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where his studies focus on digital humanities and indigenous poetics. Abel’s conceptual writing engages with the representation of indigenous peoples in anthropology and popular culture.

His chapbooks have been published by JackPine Press and Above/Ground Press, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals across Canada, including Prairie Fire, the Capilano Review, dANDelion, ARC Poetry, Descant, Broken Pencil, filling Station, Grain, OCW Magazine, Canadian Literature, CV2, and Canadian Literature. He is an editor for Poetry Is Dead magazine and former editor for PRISM International and Geist. Abel’s first book, The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Un/inhabited, Abel’s second book, was co-published by Project Space Press and Talonbooks in 2015.

Abel was named one of 12 Young Writers to Watch by CBC Books (July 2015). He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.


What?

Award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of Indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre.

After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor’s “Find” function to search for the word “injun.” The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem.

Though it has been phased out of use in our “post-racial” society, the word “injun” is peppered throughout pulp western novels. Injun retraces, defaces, and effaces the use of this word as a colonial and racial marker. While the subject matter of the source text is clearly problematic, the textual explorations in Injun help to destabilize the colonial image of the “Indian” in the source novels, the western genre as a whole, and the western canon.


When?

Arriving April 21st, 2016.

Where?

Book Launches: April 26th, Pyatt Hall (Vancouver).

Purchases: The Talonbooks website, or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Destabilizing the colonial image.

Talonbooks * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car" by Arleen Paré (Caitlin Press)

Nine reasons to prefer the pear

1
a single longing   tear-dropped
from its stem    almost
lost in yellow leaves
 
2
three upright in a bowl   
the bowl is blue   the air slowing  
as though they were breathing
 
3
paired on a plate  
their blushing skins side by side
for company   two knives
 
4
mothers-in-law prefer pears
to plums   such snobs
but they know their fruit
 
5
more than six is too many
unless they’re poached in wine
in wine no number is too many
 
6
a pear is not hurried   a pear
is not fooled   unlike an orange
a pear knows which end is up
 
7
pears hide their stone cells close to their core 
a cool gravitas   in water apples float  
pears swoon beneath

8
pears belong in porcelain   as do tulips
bananas belong in lunch bags  
pears on purple silk
 
9
when an apple’s offered   it comes with caveats
when a pear is offered   red barlett
anjou  forelle   can love be far behind? 

Who?

Arleen Paré is a Victoria poet and novelist, with an MFA graduate in poetry from the University of Victoria. Her first book, Paper Trail, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and won the Victoria Butler Book Prize. Her second book, Leaving Now, a novel, was released in 2012. Her Lake of Two Mountains won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and was nominated for the Victoria Butler Book Prize.


What?

He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car is elegiac, lyrical, ironic; a series of reflections, recollections; a collection about relationships. To leave a face in the funeral car is to fall out of time, to fall into history, ponder dust, the quiet records of suicide. This is poetry that covers the strangeness of everyday life buoyed by the solace of language, the pleasure of song.


When?

Arrived September 1st, 2015.


Where?

Book Launches: N/A.

Purchases: From the Caitlin Press website or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Dust pondering.

Caitlin Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Threshold" by Marilyn Bowering (Leaf Press)

Stag

Glac throm air do shliasaid
An déidh a snaidheadh gun fhiaradh,
Is bàrr dosrach de sgiathaibh an eioin.

On thine hip a heavy quiver flawlessly shaped, on thine
head a crest from the wings of the eagle.

- Gaelic Songs of Mary MacLeod

No stag with an arrow   through its chest
the tip   embedded
the fletching   broken
no stag   blood on its flanks
blood   in its eye
no headless stag   at the roadside
no doe pierced 

But a stag   on the hillside 
the doe   on the mud flats
the sea lapping

the forest on fire   with red leaves
and the call of   the raven

the haunted ravens
all that remain   of the violence

Who?

Marilyn Bowering is a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer who lives in British Columbia. She has received many awards for her work including designation of Notable Book by the New York Times, short-listing for the world-wide Orange Prize and a number of prizes named after women poets (Dorothy Livesay, Pat Lowther and Gwendolyn MacEwen). She is the librettist for the opera Marilyn Forever (with Gavin Bryars).


What?

The words of Threshold are plain, as bare and pregnant as the stones of a ruined croft. Marilyn Bowering unites her voice with the life and words of a silenced, exiled female Hebridean poet who speaks across three centuries. Xan Shian's photographs face this world of extremes and change with a timeless and contemporary eye.


When?

Arrived in November 2015.


Where?

Book Launches: N/A

Purchases: From the Leaf Press website or at your local bookstore. $20.


How?

Uniting voices.

Leaf Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "100 Days" by Juliane Okot Bitek (University of Alberta Press)

Day 23

Some of us fell between words
& some of us onto the sharp edges
at the end of sentences
& if we were not impaled
we’re still falling through stories that don’t make sense

Who?

Juliane Okot Bitek has never stopped exploring the power of narrative, focusing her passionate essays, poetry, and nonfiction work on political and social issues. Her work has been anthologized and published widely online, in print, and in literary magazines. Some of her writing can be found in West Coast Line, subTerrain, Warscapes.com, African Writing Online, and zocalopoets.com.


What?

100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not.

For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem—each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father—the poet Okot p'Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop. 100 Days is a collection of poetry that will stop you in your tracks.

Click here to read my interview with Juliane.


When?

Arrived in January 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: April 20th, 4 PM, at the Edmonton Poetry Festival (Edmonton).

Purchases: From the University of Alberta Press website or at your local bookstore. $19.95.


How?

Recalling.

University of Alberta Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Assdeep in Wonder" by Chris Gudgeon (Anvil Press)

Let’s start small, my darling...

Let’s start small, like elephants,
who never pass second base
on a first date.

We have whole lives ahead
of us, my darling, let’s pace
ourselves, measure

love out a teaspoon at a
time, ration it like water
on a lifeboat.

Don’t expect too much from that
first kiss, but hold on, other
kisses will come

in time, or not; we have just
this moment, expectation
will smother this

moment as surely as our
memories will carve it in soap,
the contemplation

of these two hearts as one – that’s
for children, old women and
elephants. We

must be harder on ourselves
start small, because great love stands
on tiny feet.

Who?

Chris Gudgeon is an author, poet, and screenwriter. He's contributed to dozens of periodicals—including Playboy, MAD, Geist, and The Malahat Review—and written seventeen books. Chris has more than 150 professional TV and film credits, and has worked a variety of jobs across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Gudgeon, who is bisexual, has been in an open relationship with author/self-help guru Jasper Vander Voorde since 2009. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Victoria, BC.


What?

Chris's debut collection of poetry, Assdeep in Wonder, explores the idea of identity in a myriad of context - personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures. Chris tackles tyrannical political leaders, the mystery of desire, the strictures of gender, and the absurdity of homophobia.


When?

Arrives May 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: TBD.

Purchases: At your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Stricture and mystery.

Anvil Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "How to Be Eaten by a Lion" by Michael Johnson (Nightwood Editions)

The Church of My Mother’s Hands

Her sweet loom and thread
wove our days
with awe. From the dirty lace
of corner cobwebs: dead
moths, bluebottle fly fossils;
and raven loot hoarded
in rafters and slatboarded
gables. From windowsills:
mirror and beads, brass
and keys, his own nightblack
down. His vanity at bric-a-brac
made Mom pause her trespass
into ravendom: who could take
his nest of rookery fluff
and feathers long cast off,
this salvage we mistake
for stolen? Foil, porcelain,
and rumpruff of sunbird,
remnant mange of a blurred
hummingbird’s cousin
stunned at our window,
revived by her healing,
delicate hands, bringing
the fallen back. O light, O
sweet hour, when else
are we so recklessly beautiful?
Dare the days and moonful
nights to forget this pulse:
Sunbird, caged
in bonehollows, fires
for feathers. All our hours
slowed; we aged
one immeasurable breath
as she lifted him, laid
a hand, prayed
he pass into arms Death
might fear, staring
with me and my brother,
as that bird, raised high in her
hands, took wing.

Who?

Michael Johnson's work has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead,The Malahat Review, PRISM International, Mid-American Review and Gargoyle. He was a finalist for Poetry Magazine's Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and, in 2014, won the Dr. Sherwin W Howard Award for best poetry in Weber: The Contemporary West. He lives in Penticton, BC.


What?

From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon (“the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt”), to the salmon run in British Columbia (“The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know”), Johnson writes of topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant.

Startling and haunting, the poems delve into the ways in which these moments are transformative, beautiful and unexpected. Being eaten by a lion is a gift rather than a loss, an opportunity for grace: “Instead, focus on your life, / its crimson liquor he grows drunk on. / Notice the way the red highlights his face, / how the snub nose is softened, the lips made / fuller; notice his deft musculature, his rapture.”

Lyrical and rich with visceral imagery, How to Be Eaten by a Lion lingers, exploring the world with an eye for detail and an ear for music.



When?

Arriving May 7th, 2016.


Where?

Book Launches: TBA.

Purchases: The Harbour Publishing website, or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Read the book and find out. Yum!

Nightwood Editions * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "Pound @ Guantánamo" by Clint Burhham (Talonbooks)

Zum Lazarus

1

Laß die heilgen Parabolen,
Laß die frommen Hypothesen –
Suche die verdammten Fragen
Ohne Umschweif uns zu lösen.
Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend,
Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte,
Während glücklich als ein Sieger
Trabt auf hohem Roß der Schlechte?
Woran liegt die Schuld? Ist etwa
Unser Herr nicht ganz allmächtig?
Oder treibt er selbst den Unfug?
Ach, das wäre niederträchtig.
Also fragen wir beständig,
Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll
Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler –
Aber ist das eine Antwort?


Soon Lather Us

1

lass D hi! I’ll goin’ pair of bowling shoes
last Dief men hype oh! S. Thesen
zouk divers Dump ten-forkin’
own oom’s fife undo’s lo! Sin
warm schlepped sick blue Ellen S. end
interred cries last M. Doerksen wrecked
4 end glue click Alzheimer B. Seger
trapped off homie’s ohm Ross dirt select?
Warren league’d Dee scold? Liszt oof-duh
Answer hair nicked cans all muh tick?
odour tribe to her sell-by then unfucked?
Act, that’s far need ’er track Tigg
Also fraggin’ fur best and dig
peace man unsmitten eyin’ her handful
err de end lick stopped fit to die mauler
hey Ray Burr pissed Dasein ant forth?

Who?

Clint Burnham is widely published as a critical theorist, poet, and author of books on digital culture. He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery and Fredric Jameson, a novel titled Smoke Show (2005), and several books of poetry, including The Benjamin Sonnets (2009). His most recent critical book is The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2012). His most recent art writing includes a catalogue essay on Canadian photographer Kelly Wood; an essay on Edward Burtynsky is in the forthcoming Petrocultures collection from McGill-Queens. During a residency at the Urban Subjects Collective in Vienna in 2014–15, he wrote books on Slavoj Žižek and digital culture, and on Fredric Jameson and Wolf of Wall Street.

Burnham is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy. He is a founding member of the Vancouver Lacan Salon.


What?

Throughout these poems is a meeting of obscene or politically charged material, as well as commentary on language usage under extreme circumstances of duress such as the Arab Spring. This is poetry written in conditions of wartime. The title implies an analogy between Ezra Pound, imprisoned at Pisa after World War II, and the inhabitants of the military or CIA prisons at Guantánamo Bay.

Poems cross the page or are more architectural, in tight columns, or curve like a cyberpunk office tower. Entire continents are leaped across in a line or two: “from Burquitlam Plaza to Redondo Beach metro stop/Bush with Burqas for the B.U.” but written in a city where bus drivers fix their trolley lines, and Squamish is a place you drive to, in your imagination, during a job interview conducted over the phone.

Place, in this poetry, is both a name (but whose name? the colonizer? First Nation? mall developer?) and a root grows in one’s popular culture as the only way to recognize the war machine (“why cadence weapon left Friendster/why the Flava Flav transformer twins’re buck-toothed”). A final word on style: Burnham’s language is compressed like an MP3 file (one of the worst music files, notoriously).


When?

Arriving April 21st, 2016.

Where?

Book Launches: April 26th, Pyatt Hall (Vancouver).

Purchases: The Talonbooks website, or at your local bookstore. $17.95.


How?

Curving like a cyberpunk office tower.

Talonbooks * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

BC Poetry 2016: "The Bird in the Stillness" by Joe Rosenblatt (Porcupine's Quill)

Greener

There are many haunting spirits in these silent woods.
I feel their presence as I wander along a winding trail.
Hearing the sound of splintered wood in a falling tree
I’m made aware that a beginning is ligatured to an end.
A garter snake sloughs off its skin to grow another hide.
In envy, I dare to ask: why don’t I have that kind of magic?
I’d gladly become his shadow undulating in the daylight
and shimmy on the ground beneath some ghostly moss.

Moving like a millipede the darkness nibbles on a soul.
There’s nowhere for me—time itself faces devourment
for as I’m being nibbled, there’ll be nothing left to view.
Under the Green Man’s foliated face a grim visage is hidden
that bears a frightful resemblance to the maker of this sonnet.
I’ll need to let some sunlight in to make my psyche greener.

Who?

Joe Rosenblatt is an accomplished author and artist who, over the course of a five-decade career, has produced over twenty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and visual art. He was the second poet to be published by Coach House Press, which released The LSD Leacock in 1966. Rosenblatt has since received several major awards, including the Governor General’s Award for his poetry collection Top Soil, as well as the B.C. Book Prize for Poetry Hotel in 1986. He lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.


What?

The Green Man’s forest is full of spirits. Circumspect eyes track defiant interlopers while decaying tree stumps nurse saplings with maternal tenderness. Tree branches entwine sensuously, and leaves rustle like the whispers of lovers. A bird in the stillness waits, talons sharp, preparing to make his kill.

Joe Rosenblatt’s latest collection of poems, The Bird in the Stillness, provides a rich buffet of physical, spiritual and artistic nourishment for any pilgrim who cares to walk the woodland path ... and acknowledge that his warranty on breathing might be nearing its expiry.

"These poems are roots and foliage, a world Rosenblatt inhabits, imaginary or not. In the dark forest there is always the light inside a tree, glowing through the bark, like Rosenblatt’s poetic voice, what he calls "that sylvan part of me". The Green Man, or Rosenblatt, lounging in a hollow of the tree." — Patrick Friesen


When?

Arrived March 31st, 2016!


Where?

Book Launches: Unknown.

Purchases: The Porcupine's Quill's website, or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Waiting, talons sharp.

Porcupine's Quill * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.