4/29/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Out, Ups and Downs of Marriage" eds. Fiona Tinwei Lam and Jane Silcott (Caitlin Press)



"By the time you listen to this, I’ll be gone" by Chelene Knight

Side A. 1999

I never wanted to get married. Two friends gave it a shot. I admired them. I missed them. I watched them do things like tuck their shirts in, iron jeans, put the kettle on, set the table, burn bridges, build new ones. I watched them leave their lives behind. Sit down in prayer, hands clasped together, Lord grant me the strength. We are only young once. But when you’ve barely left high school and your old seat at the back of the class is still warm and even your mother had her doubts, do not worry about your fear of the sexless existence between two people whose loose lips spew pleasantries over a mashed-potato dinner, keep secrets in their tailored pockets, permanent-marker foreheads with the usual: how was your day, the kids are asleep, what time are you coming home, shopping lists, soccer games—falling into a dark pit of societal expectations, noose around the neck, ball and chain games, you’d never play—

Side B. 2017

by the rules. Pull the sheets up around my chin. Another wedding. I didn’t want to be like them. Open bar. I’ll sit at the back tweeting about how amazing her dress is. Long lace sleeveless sheer back, empire waist—she’s slamming champagne and smiling. I post a photo for proof. Thirty-four likes and sixteen retweets later, the first dance slaps me in the face when I realize they were playing my song—I did want to be like them, absorbing speeches, future blessings. I want them to be happy but this isn’t how I pictured myself at thirty-five. The bus ride home forces a handwritten story to slowly tattoo itself somewhere on my body that I cannot see. Eyes shut. Three shots of whisky before sleep comes. Morning coffee blacks my tongue. Jeans too tight—a reminder that my old tricks no longer work. Dim the lights. My eyes brighten. Watch me part my hair in the other direction while three grey hairs shake their heads. Tick tock. Maybe I just wanted someone to ask me. Tick tock. And mean it. Maybe I just wanted someone to not leave. Stay. I’m OK now. I’m OK with my choices. I’ll sit under the sun bare-legged and smiling. So go ahead and pour me two shots of gin to erase my thighs, stomach—a folded and used road map for the places I’ve been. I’m free here and content with never staying long enough to learn their names.


Who?

Chelene Knight is a Vancouver born-and-raised graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU. In addition to being a workshop facilitator for teens, she is also a literary event organizer, host, and seasoned panelist. She has been published in various Canadian and American literary magazines, and her work is widely anthologized. Chelene is currently the Managing Editor at Room magazine, and the 2018 Programming Director for the Growing Room Festival. Braided Skin, her first book (Mother Tongue Publishing, March 2015), has given birth to numerous writing projects including her second book, memoir, Dear Current Occupant (BookThug, 2018).


Fiona Tinwei Lam is a Scottish-born, Vancouver-based writer whose work has appeared in literary magazines across the country, as well as in the Globe & Mail, and anthologies in Canada, the US and Hong Kong. Her work has also been featured as part of B.C.’s Poetry in Transit program. Her book of poetry Intimate Distances (Nightwood 2002) was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Twice short-listed for the Event literary non-fiction contest, she is a co-editor of and contributor to the anthology of personal essays, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queens University Press, 2008). Her work also appeared in the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2010 (Tightrope Books, 2010), edited by Lorna Crozier. Her new collection of poetry, Enter the Chrysanthemum (Caitlin, 2009), depicts the journey into single parenthood, exploring themes of family, love and loss. She is a former lawyer.


Jane Silcott’s first collection of essays, Everything Rustles, was published in 2013 with Anvil Press and shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert Evans Nonfiction award in the BC Book Prizes. Her writing has appeared in several Canadian literary magazines and anthologies and been recognized by the CBC Literary Awards (in 2005 she won second place for an essay about motherhood and writing); the National and Western Magazine Awards, Room Magazine, and the Creative Nonfiction Collective of Canada. Jane is a mentor in the MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax and Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Victoria.


What?

What keeps us together? What breaks us apart? In Love Me True, 27 creative nonfiction writers and 20 poets explore how marriage and committed relationships have challenged, shaped, supported and changed them. The stories and poems in this collection delve deep into the mysteries of long-term bonds. The authors cover a gamut of issues and ideas–everything from everyday conflicts to deep philosophical divides, as well as jealousy, adultery, physical or mental illness, and loss. There’s happiness here too, along with love and companionship, whether the long-term partnering is monogamous, polyamorous, same-sex or otherwise. From surprise proposals, stolen quickies, and snoring to arranged marriage, affairs, suicide, and much more, the wide-ranging personal stories and poems in Love Me True are sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, and always engaging as they offer their intimate and varied insights into the complex state that is marriage.


When?

Arrived February 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Caitlin Press website or at your local bookstore. $24.95.


How?

Delving deep into the mysteries of long-term bonds.

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

BC Poetry 2018: "Refugium: Poems for the Pacific" ed. Yvonne Blomer (Caitlin Press)



"Sinking" by Luther Allen

there are those of us
at the bow of the boat
breathing deeply
eyes front
teeth bared
for anything

and those
at the stern watching
what was
disappear with the wake

and the dwindling orcas
who would say 
if they could

there are too many boats
heedless

no matter the gaze


Who?

Luther Allen writes and designs buildings from Sumas Mountain, Washington. He facilitates SpeakEasy, a community poetry reading series in Bellingham and is co-editor of Noisy Water, an anthology of local poets. His collection of poems, The View from Lummi Island, can be found at http://othermindpress.wordpress.com.
Yvonne Blomer is Victoria’s poet laureate, 2015-2018. Her most recent collection is As If a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2014). Her travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur was published with Palimpsest Press in 2017. Yvonne holds an MA with distinction from the University of East Anglia, UK.






What?

While in the world of politics there are still climate change deniers, the poets watch the warming seas, the dying birds slicked in oil, the whales, the jellies, the sea otters and the octopus. They stand, as close to the shore as possible, watch the slow turning tide. In this collection of poems from the coast of B.C., California, Washington State, to Alaska and as far away as Auckland, New Zealand and as far back as early 19th century Japan these poems explore our connection to the Pacific, what we know and don’t know, how we’ve already changed the shore and the sea and what we fear losing. Poets in this anthology include John Barton, Brian Brett, Bruce Cockburn, Lorna Crozier, Brenda Hillman, Gary Geddes, Steven Heighton, Patrick Lane, Arleen Paré, Melanie Siebert, Anne Simpson, Rob Taylor, Patricia Young, Jan Zwicky and many more. In Refugium, editor Yvonne Blomer explores her deep concern with our sixth extinction and how stoic humans are continuing to wreak damage on the planet and her oceans.


When?

Arrived September 2017.


Where?

Purchase from the Caitlin Press website or at your local bookstore. $22.95.


How?

Standing as close to the shore as possible.



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

4/28/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Some End / West Broadway" by George Bowering and George Stanley (New Star Books)


"Letter to George Stanley" by George Bowering
Was I the girl running across Broadway,
        or the boy she kissed? And what am I doing
in one of your poems, anyway? All these question marks, 
you’d think I’m writing a Phyllis Webb poem, you’d 
think I am sexually wiser than I am, than I
ever was. I’m stuck in a short novel about sexual 
ownership and a small mountain with nobody 
jumping from it. I don’t feel like a Greek hero,
I look through the windows on 11th Avenue and no one is 
    there,
no dogs on this street, no pizza for breakfast, the book
is hard to live through, the small mountain blocks no view, 
the Okanagan people have been there all this aeon,
the planet will be devoid of readers in short order, 
I’m too old to run across Broadway, I’ve just learned 
how to use a treadmill, the latest mouse in the lab. 
I’ll be in your poem if you’ll be in mine. Every time 
I put pen to paper my spring-loaded Jesus
wobbles on my desk, from which I see nothing
but disdainful trees, younger than the Okanagan people, 
even older than you, old friend, old connection
to the real. If I were going to start an ism, it 
wouldn’t be that one. I’m just standing here
on a sidewalk in Kitsilano, waiting for a kiss, ex- 
pecting a muse in a tiny skirt dodging traffic.
I wonder whether she too has an adverb for a last 
name. “Gross Fatigue,” it says on that marquee.


"Letter to George Bowering" by George Stanley
I am the boy no one thinks is cute
standing in the shade of Granville Clock Tower
when this big girl comes running, legs pounding,
across Broadway and — what? — she’s coming
straight at me, throws her arms around me & plops
a big kiss on me. What was I to do but
change the subject. I saw a white butterfly
fluttter by my porch door, I think it was the first one
this century. We got married of course. Like so many
others, I became president of UBC. ‘The imagination
of man (writes Hume) is naturally sublime,
delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary,
and running, without control, into the most distant
parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects
which custom has rendered too familiar to it.’ Let’s run
across streets in Shanghai and Dubai.

We go way back. You’re a better poet
than Seamus Heaney. I’m in the middle
of an Akhmatova translation (imitation)
that I can’t get to stay put in 1944.
My Paterson pastiche (the second one)
piles up its own delta as it trickles
haphazardly toward the precipice. These objects
are not too familiar, trees I always call lindens,
from the porch a glimpse of Grouse. Yet out my window
the building across Balaclava Kidsbooks used to occupy
will come down soon. The city changes
faster than the heart. We’re reading
our next books.


Who?

George Bowering taught English at Simon Fraser University from 1972 until his retirement in 2001. Canada's first Poet Laureate, he is an Officer of both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia. He was one of the founders of the poetry publication Tish, served as and has received two Governor General's awards: the first, for poetry, in 1969 for The Gangs of Kosmos and Rocky Mountain Foot and the second, in 1980, for Burning Water, reissued by New Star in 2007. Bowering is well–known for his love of baseball, about which he has also written. He is the author of nine novels, five books of short stories, and numerous volumes of poetry, including Autobiology (New Star, 1972).

Born in San Francisco, poet George Stanley has been living in BC since the early 1970s, first in Vancouver, then in Terrace and back in Vancouver. A former instructor in the English department at Capilano College, he has published six books, including Gentle Northern Summer, Opening Day, The Stick, and You. He is the recipient of the 2006 Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry.


What?

A masterpiece of late style and friendship, Some End / West Broadway combines back to back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley.

Stanley's West Broadway is a long poem, composed over the past decade, following on Stanley's other long city poems, "San Francisco's Gone", "Terrace Landscapes", and Vancouver: A Poem. Like those poems, West Broadway has embedded in it shorter verse poems that stand on their own.

Bowering's Some End is a suite of thirty–two poems tracking his recovery from a near fatal cardiac arrest in 2015. Throughout, Bowering's wit, his command of the idiom, and his ironic self–awareness shine through as powerfully as ever.


When?

Arrived February 2018.


Where?


Purchase from the New Star Books website or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Late style and friendship.



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

4/27/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "The Dance Floor Tilts" by Susan Alexander (Thistledown Press)



At Home

So much is left undone.
Burdock grows rank around the steps.
Hops climb in the windows
like corkscrew assassins,
clothed in innocent green.
The transparent apple tree scrapes the roof
and the lilacs’ suckers rub the siding,
bridges for carpenter ants.
A poet shouldn’t live in a house.
The weight of what is neglected,
those hefty timbers, unpeopled stories, 
might crush her hummingbird words.



Who?

Susan Alexander is the winner of the 2016 Short Grain poetry prize and the 2015 Vancouver Writers’ Festival Contest. Her poems have appeared in SubTerrain, Arc, CV2, Grain, Room, The Antigonish Review, and PRISM international. For inspiration, Alexander writes from eclectic experiences — as a chambermaid, CBC Radio journalist, stay-at-home mother, waitress, lay preacher, and associate at a boutique investment firm, as well as from her family history and passions. She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and lives on Bowen Island, BC.


What?

As the dance floor of life tilts beneath our feet, do we keep dancing? In The Dance Floor Tilts we sway to the rhythms of passion and death, of family, myth and benediction. In worlds where cow-eyed goddesses steal nymph’s tongues and steering wheels are taken over by octopi, there are no established signposts. The individual moments making up the tune of this poet’s life offer the possibility of finding the beauty within the everyday resonance of our own existence.


When?

Arrived October 2017.


Where?


Purchase from the Thistledown Press website or at your local bookstore. $17.95


How?

Establishing no signposts



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


4/26/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Songs for Dead Children" by E.D. Blodgett (University of Alberta Press)


from Songs for Dead Children

and water
remembered as
a fountain in the mind

splashing over him
as if he had been
a mountain behind clouds

his being
falling water all
the being that is


Who?

E.D. Blodgett is a literary historian, translator, and poet. He has published 28 books of poetry, of which 2 were awarded the Governor General’s Award. Translations of his poetry have appeared in French, Serbian, and Hebrew, among other languages. He was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, a former Writer-in-Residence at Grant MacEwan University (2004), and past poet laureate of Edmonton (2007-09). He is currently involved in writing a bilingual renga with a Francophone poet from Winnipeg.


What?

In a series of poems inspired by Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, E.D. Blodgett searches for meaning amidst grief. In the contemplative gentleness of his words, he finds the special light children possess in their state of unknowing as they encounter the world. These sparse poems move through acceptance and resignation to the solace that exists in the word. Songs for Dead Children will speak to readers who have experienced loss, are exploring grief, or want to find a way to connect with stillness.

"Blodgett’s profound poetic meditation explores primordial innocence, the brutalities and betrayals of the current world of experience, and the possibility of an integrated, timeless state of innocence. These poems leap, skip, lament, and sing, offering hope that creativity, playfulness and empathy lie at the base of all being. They will break your heart, take your breath away, and give it back again in “verdant hallelujahs.”"
- Susan McCaslin


When?

Arrived in March 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the University of Alberta Press website or at your local bookstore. $19.95.


How?

Leaping, skipping, lamenting, singing.



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

4/25/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Little Wild" by Curtis LeBlanc (Nightwood Editions)


I Am Not for This World Awake

Five blocks from this apartment, the tide
has served a final eviction notice
to bull kelp and capsized dungeness
left to suffocate in cool air
on a beach I never visit.

When I was younger
and that much further
east, I used to pray
to sand dollars in a vase
on my mother’ s vanity.

Now, while my thin sliver
of the earth is still dragging
through its last moments
of muddy darkness, I hope
for traffic sounds to drown out
the calls of small birds outside
this single-pane window.


Who?

Curtis LeBlanc was shortlisted for the Walrus Poetry Prize in 2016, received the Readers’ Choice Award in Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest and was shortlisted for CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in The Malahat Review, Eighteen Bridges, Prairie Fire, EVENT, Geist, Arc, NewPoetry.ca and Frog Hollow Press’ The City Series: Edmonton Anthology. He’s Managing Editor of Rahila’s Ghost Press, co-host of Tonic Reading Series, Web Editor at Nineteen Questions and an occasional hockey columnist for NHL Numbers. He served as Executive Editor of Promotions at PRISM international in 2016-2017. His poetry chapbook Good for Nothing was published by Anstruther Press in 2017. LeBlanc lives in Vancouver, BC.


What?

Little Wild explores the performance of masculinity in contemporary Canada, with a focus on how toxic masculinity relates to mental health, aggression, substance abuse and crises of identity. Through the reimagining of family histories and personal experiences, the poems in this collection exact a representation of a young man in conflict with outdated ideals of virility, struggling to redefine himself on his own terms. Little Wild is a provocative and revealing portrayal of masculinity as it is understood—and misunderstood—in a contemporary and ever-changing context. The poems are as powerful and unsettling as they are stark, combining unsentimental imagery of the natural world with first-person commentary, while exploring narratives of boyhood, adolescence and adulthood.



When?

Launched last week in Vancouver!


Where?


Purchase from the Harbour Publishing website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Exploring the performance of masculinity.



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

4/24/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Prison Industrial Complex Explodes" by Mercedes Eng (Talonbooks)




Q. 4.1
Has your institution undertaken
initiatives to incorporate the language skills of employees
from various backgrounds?












they let out Jessi’s dad when Carole gave birth to 
their daughter
beautiful Carole, paper-bag-coloured skin a black waterfall 
of Pocahontas hair
Jessi was lucky to get a golden halo

Jessi’s destatused mama died of the system
they let out Jessi’s dad to look after her
once the price of her mama was extracted

I wonder how it is for beautiful
could-pass-for-a-white-girl Jessi
would-be-pheneticized-as-a-white-girl Jessi

Jessi who not only looked like a white girl
but the right kind of white girl
the kind of white girl boys and men go to war over
the kind of white girl who needs more lebensraum
the kind of white girl I used to wanna be


Who?

Mercedes Eng teaches and writes in Vancouver, on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. She is the author of Mercenary English (CUE Books, 2013; Mercenary Press, 2016), a long poem about violence and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver. Her writing has appeared in Jacket 2, The Downtown East, The Volcano, on the sides of the Burrard and Granville Bridges as contributions to public art projects, and in the collectively produced chapbooks, r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Surveillance, and M’aidez (Press Release). She is currently working on a women’s prison reader and a detective novel set in her grandfather’s Chinatown supper club, circa 1948.


What?

Combining text from government questionnaires, reports, and corporate websites, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples’ attempts to protect their traditional and unceded territories from ecological destruction by classifying their actions as acts of terrorism, and it criminalizes refugees who, as victims of colonization and globalization, attempt to flee genocide and poverty yet are targeted as suspected terrorists. Simultaneously, the incarceration of Indigenous people, refugees, and people of colour is rapidly increasing as corporations eagerly court the government for private-public partnerships to fund the building of new prisons and detention centres.

The impetus for Prison Industrial Complex Explodes was the discovery of a cache of Eng’s father’s prison correspondence: letters from the federal government stating their intention to deport him because of his criminal record; letters from prison justice advocate Michael Jackson advising her father on deportation; letters from the RCMP regarding the theft of her father’s property, a gold necklace, while in transport to prison; letters from family members and friends; letters from Eng and her brother. The cold formality of the government letters in accidental juxtaposition with the emotion of the personal letters struck a creative spark that led to the writing of this long poem.


When?

Arrived November 2017. You can watch a video of her launch here.


Where?

Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $17.95.


How?

Examining the possibility of a privatized prison system



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

BC Poetry 2018: "The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems" by Tiziana La Melia (Talonbooks)




from The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems
Plants barely rooted are blurry with gossamer
Experiment by loosening roots
Shadow soil pressed down by nothing in particular
By rain, rats, sparrows
Or the body weight if its custodian
Dripping white paint onto the exterior shell.
The landlord applied glossy paint as a remedy for places attracting boot scuffs, sauce
splatters, coffee spills, and dust. We used hay to discourage the horsetail and knotweed.
The leggy poppies’ downy stems are some kind of antennae to feel the air
Let’s pretend to read electricity, let’s retire to the crotch of a big walnut tree.


Who?

Born in Italy and currently living on unceded Coast Salish territories, Tiziana La Melia is the author of Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writing (Publication Studio, 2015) and the chapbook Broom Emotion (2012). Recent solo and collaborative presentations of her work include The pigeon looks for death in the space between the needle and the haystack, LECLERECentfare d’art (Marseille, 2017); Broom Emotion, galerie anne baurrault (Paris, 2017); Innocence at Home, CSA (Vancouver, 2015); and Johnny Suede, Damien and the Love Guru (Brussels, 2017). In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW (Toronto) and winner of the 2014 RBC Painting Competition Prize.


What?

Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition.

The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object? At once a book of poetry and an artist’s book, it gathers together poems, performance scripts, and parallel texts, illustrating the hybrid nature of these texts and trespassing upon the boundaries of genre. It is a book about enmeshment, about the potentiality of interplay. It is a conversation. It is not linear, but it interrogates and explores the line: lines of text, lines of dialogue, socio-economic lines drawn or crossed, lines that were the trails of snails … Everything is a signifier, meaning is elastic, and references are multifaceted. La Melia’s multivalent and generative practice lives in process; it thinks through materials (paint, objects, non-human forms) with violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, and an awareness of the body and memory.

The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems meshes conflicting modes of thinking to produce a collage of thought through the body, through the material, and through slippages of language. This collection comes out of friendship; it is for other poets, artists, or for anyone interested in ecology, communication, contradiction, displacement, subjectivity, memory, art, reading, and writing. It is comfortably uncertain, contradictory, and reflective. In defiance of order, La Melia’s haptic writing is as a riddle inquiring after our environment and our attempts to situate ourselves within our uncertain time.


When?

Arriving May 1st, 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $17.95.


How?

Moving between the page and the exhibition.



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

4/23/2018

BC Poetry 2018: ""Oh Not So Great": Poems from the Depression Project" by Rob Taylor (Leaf Press)


Bob Dylan Setlist

Bob Dylan and his band were in town. He is one of my musical heroes so I had 14th row floors. I had been looking forward to it for weeks and then the day of the show, I couldn't do it. I spent the next couple hours in tears because I knew then that by not going there was something really wrong. It brought me down to a place where I thought: it's got me by the throat now.
- M.K.

Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Worried Blues
Tangled Up in Blue
Blowin’ in the Wind
Mix-Up Confusion
What Was It You Wanted?
Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence
Going, Going, Gone
I Threw It All Away
Abandoned Love
Too Much of Nothing
Never Gonna Be the Same Again
Everything is Broken
Tears of Rage
What Good Am I?
You’re No Good
A Fool Such as I
Seeing the Real You At Last
When You Gonna Wake Up?
Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart
He Was a Friend of Mine



Who?

Rob Taylor is the author of the poetry collections The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011) and The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob was the recipient of a 2015 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, as an emerging artist. Oh, and he runs this blog!


What?

"Oh Not So Great": Poems from the Depression Project is a collection of 30 poems on depression, broken into nine sections: sadness, poor sleep, loss of interest, guilt, low energy, poor concentration, abnormal appetite, psychomotor retardation/agitation, and suicidality (known by the medical acronym SSIGECAPS). All of the poems are inspired by, or drawn from, the transcripts of group discussions between people living with severe depression.

"These poems are the result of a years-long project designed to create for physicians a doorway to empathy with patients who suffer from mental illness. As it turns out, they open that door wide for us all. Here are people speaking from deep within the isolating world of depression, their stories transformed into poetry by Rob Taylor’s considerable talents. From the heart-rending admission to a friend in the first poem (It’s the one gift / I do give you, every day / I don’t call), to the final lines (You walk alone / across the room, sit by the fire, / and wait there for the longest time), this collection unveils a reality lived by far too many people, one most of us don’t know how to handle — not when we experience it ourselves, not when loved ones are going through it. Read this book. It will help."

—Sandy Shreve, author of Waiting for the Albatross and Suddenly, So Much


When?

Launched in Vancouver in January 2018, launch to come in Coquitlam in June. Details TBA.


Where?


Purchase from the Leaf Press website or at your local bookstore. $16.95


How?

Creating a doorway.



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


4/22/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Elemental" by Kate Braid (Caitlin Press)


Masters of the Earth

Do you know? Don’t you wonder? What's going on down under you? — David Crosby
Masters of the earth, when you shelter under a tree in a storm, place your ear against its bark: listen as it sings in a long wild key while roots, like toes, scramble under you. Seismologists can’t test during storms because the movement of tree roots distorts sound. So while wind whips rain ‘round your head and you take these trees for givens, remember you lean your ear against a living friend and be careful.


Who?

Beginning in 1977, Kate Braid worked for fifteen years as a construction labourer, apprentice, red-seal carpenter and contractor. She was the first woman on the Executive Board of the Vancouver, BC Carpenters' Union and first woman to teach construction at the BC Institute of Technology. She later taught Creative Writing for 12 years. She has published fourteen books and chapbooks of non-fiction (including a memoir, Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World), and of prize-winning poetry.


What?

Usually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked with and depended upon. Out of these she has crafted an intimate picture of what it is like to be wholly engaged with the elemental materials of earth, sky, water, fire and wood that we depend upon every day. Elemental is a poignant, intelligent collection that asks us to look more closely at ourselves and the details that construct our rich and delicate world.


When?

Arrived February 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Caitlin Press or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Paying attention to the materials.



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



4/21/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food" ed. Rachel Rose (Anvil Press)


"fried onions" by Pardis Pahlavanlu

sizzling onions dancing
in turmeric yellow
passing through the material barrier
and making their way to eternity.

who would have thought paradise was the smell in one’s hair?


Who?

Pardis Pahlvanlu is an exiled Iranian artist living on Coast Salish territories. Her work focues on loss, diaspora and the intersection of mental health. She aims to rediscover home in each piece she creates.

Rachel Rose's work has appeared in various journals including Poetry, The Malahat Review, and The Best American Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies. Her most recent poetry collection, Song & Spectacle (Harbour, 2012) won the Audre Lorde Award in the US and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in Canada. She was the librettist for the opera When the Sun Comes Out, which grapples with fundamentalism and forbidden love. She is the winner of the Peterson Memorial Prize for Poetry and the Bronwen Wallace Award for Fiction, and the recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize. She is the poet Laureate of Vancouver for 2014-2017.


What?

Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food brings to the table some of Canada’s best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver’s literary and culinary scene. Punctuated by beautiful local food photographs, interviews with and recipes from some of our top local chefs, each of these short pieces will shock, comfort, praise, entice, or invite reconciliation, all while illuminating our living history through the lens of food. Sustenance is also a community response to the needs of new arrivals or low-income families in our city. The contributors have donated their honoraria to the BC Farmers Market Nutrition Coupon Program. A portion of sales from every book will go towards providing a refugee or low-income family with fresh, locally grown produce, and at the same time will support B.C. farmers, fishers, and gardeners.


When?

Arrived November 2017.


Where?

Purchase from the Anvil Press website or at your local bookstore. $25.


How?

Illuminating our living history through the lens of food.



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


BC Poetry 2018: "Quarrels" by Eve Joseph (Anvil Press)


from Quarrels

THE CAPON EXPLODED OUT OF THE PRESSURE COOKER AND STUCK IN
the kitchen ceiling. It hung there like a black chandelier. People took turns trying to 
pull it out with no success. Its charred head poked out of the roof and acted as a 
weather vane. The wind polished it until it gleamed like a well-worn doorknob. We 
adjusted to the smell of burnt bones and set the table as usual. In the 9th Century, 
Pope Nicholas decreed that a cock had to top every church steeple in Europe. Our 
home was a holy place. We worshipped all that crawled. All that flew. 



Who?

Eve Joseph's two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans Award for nonfiction and was named one of the top 100 picks of the year by the Globe and Mail.


What?

The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poems.
The poems in Quarrels collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor's hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists.


When?

Arrives May 7, 2018.


Where?

Launches:

May 15, 7:30 PM, Munro's Books: Victoria Book Launch, featuring Eve Joseph, Patrick Friesen and Bill Gaston.

Purchases:

Purchase from the All Lit Up website or at your local bookstore. $18.


How?

Reaching for something other than truth.



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


4/20/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Ritual Lights" by Joelle Barron (Goose Lane Editions)


Two Virgos

Hermits of the Tarot, I daydream about reading
your cards somewhere on a rainy afternoon.
Remember when I kissed you after Pride
then passed out drunk? Now, we’re two provinces
apart. You don’t want children; I already have
one. You sent valerian tea for my birthday;
I sent flowers for yours, wafts of peony, bluebells.
The tea was meant to soothe me. Or maybe
you just had it lying around, like my aunt who
keeps a closet of gifts for no one in particular.
Valerian calms, but my cheeks are flushed,
heart beating hummingbird-quick. I believe
there’s a universe where we knit together
on the couch, toes barely touching. Quietly
sipping from twin mugs of heat.


Who?

Joelle Barron is a writer and doula living as a settler on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe of Treaty 3 in Kenora, Ontario. Joelle’s poems have appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine, SAD Magazine, the Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, and other journals. “A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould” won the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award. Joelle is a graduate of the MFA program of the University of British Columbia and now works as a co-ordinator for both Kenora Pride and SPACE, an LGBT2S youth group.


What?

Absorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam.


When?

Arrived March 2018.


Where?

Launch:

April 24th, 6:30 PM: Vancouver Launch @ the Verses Festival, feat. Joelle Barron, Alessandra Naccarato and Ellie Sawatzky. $10/$12.

Purchases:
Purchase from the Goose Lane Editions website or at your local bookstore. $19.95.


How?

Tearing open the fruit of life.



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

4/19/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Rain Shadow" by Nicholas Bradley (University of Alberta Press)


Some Goats

The barrelling fog clears.
On the attenuated ledge
above the hanging valley,
five sudden goats. Air settles
lightly on crumbling stone.
They pick their way
across the crag without
stumbling or slipping,
taking no notice of heights
as they search for the least
sterile of rocks and transmute
nothing into lunch. At three thousand
metres, hobnailed conundrums
munch. Some goats are puzzles.
Some goats are postcards
mailed by mountains to say
Wish you were here.


Who?

Nicholas Bradley is a poet, literary critic, and scholarly editor. His first book of poetry, Rain Shadow, was published this year by the University of Alberta Press. He is also the author of a chapbook — Five Sudden Goats: Rocky Mountain Poems — and his poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals in Canada and the U.S. He lives with his family in Victoria, British Columbia, and is currently writing a second collection of poems.


What?

Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which people and nature are inextricably entwined.


When?

Arrived March 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the University of Alberta Press website or at your local bookstore. $19.95.


How?

Ranging through destabilized lives and landscapes.



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

4/18/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "the bridge from day to night" by David Zieroth (Harbour Publishing)


here in the wet

…a child stops on the street and tries to pry
from concrete the stuck-on part of a wing
some hatchling that grew big but could not
fly and was crushed, body so scant it 
vanished under rain and beaks of crows

only ribs of desiccated primaries remain –
and these he wants to lift up, but his mother
scolds him, laughing, nonplussed he has 
yet to learn what cannot be safely touched
and this stir returns to the boy later

when he has sons of his own, sees so often
hazards of the day, learns not to fear them
entirely and thus is pierced hearing his 
mother’s mirth, she among the long dead 
her shining hair once constant, comforting

gone, and he recalls a purple shadow
fleeting through that breath: his father
peered down as if he, too, could toy with
an emptiness that yet wanted holding
as it called out for a child’s moist hand


Who?

David Zieroth has published many books of poetry including The Fly in Autumn (2009), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, How I Joined Humanity at Last (1998), which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and most recently, Albrecht Dürer and me (2014). He taught at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC, before retiring and founding The Alfred Gustav Press. Born in Neepawa, MB, he lives in North Vancouver, BC.


What?

The title poem in David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night follows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver, a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the sublime: “from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look directly into / their deepest clefts.” Such moments occur throughout the collection, as Zieroth explores the resonance built from layers of such ordinary moments as they accumulate throughout a lifetime—indistinct and imperceptible as they occur, but creating unseen undercurrents through memory and time.

In this temporal landscape, the natural world becomes a touchstone, both entangled in and standing apart from the speaker’s internal narrative: “I brought from that forming hour a / precise smell of foliage: funeral wreaths / bore an acid scent.” Shifting fluidly through time, the speaker grows from a child to understand, reflect and then outlive his parents. Finally, the collection lights on the incongruities and contradictions in death: “still later I kick his flattened corpse / to the gutter, and it skids on concrete / a broken valise, weightless / on this segment of the journey.”

With his characteristic humour, subtlety and ability to find transcendence in the everyday, Zieroth traces the delicate strands connecting the most minute and familiar details to the most profound mysteries, giving voice to the unknowable.


When?

Arrived March 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Harbour Publishing website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Tracing the delicate strands.



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

4/17/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "Duets" by Edward Byrne (Talonbooks)




from Duets
Nobody no other so clever
given my looks so divine so good
could ever discover breathless love
Mad love sharp eyed wound innocent heart
suck and sucking cauterize harsh fate
makes the fix both cut and remedy
I beg assailant scorpion prick
kill only pain and not desire
without which caro I cannot be


Who?

Edward Byrne was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and moved to Vancouver in the late 1960s. His earlier writing appeared in publications like Canadian Forum and The Fiddlehead, and he is the author of Aporia (1989) and Beautiful Lies (1995) and the co-editor of The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser (1999). Byrne earned a master’s degree in comparative literature at University of British Columbia where he still teaches one class each term in the Humanities 101 Program. Byrne was the Director of the Trade Union Research Bureau in Vancouver for many years. He was also a board member of the Kootenay School of Writing for ten years. Currently he is a member and Treasurer of the Lacan Salon and a member of the Meschonnic Study Group. Byrne is working on various writing projects, including a sequel to his novel Beautiful Lies and a book of short poems.


What?

Edward Byrne’s Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti.

In the case of Labé, the twenty-four sonnets – twenty-three in French, one in Italian – constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the duration of an intense love affair. In the case of Cavalcanti, the sonnets are not sequential, but have been selected from the most explicitly philosophical of his sonnets – those which demonstrate his “radical Aristotelianism.” In both cases, one of a pre-Petrarchan poet, the other post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness, madness, or malady and as something that gives rise to speculation regarding the relationship between body and intellect.

The reader will find herein ninety poems, equally “translations” of Labé and Cavalcanti and “versions” authored by Byrne. Each sonnet is made up of nine lines, each line, in turn, made up of nine syllables. The work’s main body is written in the manner of the serial poem, a practice whereby the composing mind passes from room to room – and from stanza to stanza – in a kind of trance, forgetting and remembering. A distant but undeniable antecedent to this practice, in the context of translation, can be found in Robin Blaser’s masterful translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères. The second version of Louise Labé’s sonnet sequence was translated from Rilke’s German version, using Labé’s Middle French text as a ‘pony.’ Interspersed within, or intervening in, the translations are “sonnets” by Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Marcel Proust, and Jacques Lacan. Between the main translations, readers will discover a sequence of wild sonnets, or nonets, taken from a separate collaboration of Byrne’s with Kim Minkus, and a handful of sonnets by Labé’s contemporaneous admirers – members of her salon, such as Maurice Scève and Clément Marot.


When?

Arriving April 20th, 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Passing from room to room in a kind of trance.



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

BC Poetry 2018: "Checking In" by Adeena Karasick (Talonbooks)




from Checking In
Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify

Bartleby just checked in at Scribner’s

Marshall McLuhan is rockin’ out to the Global Village People

bp is filling up at BP

Moses Maimonides is launching the Hitchhiker’s Guide for the Perplexed

Herman Melville is listening to Hootie and the Blowfish

William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud

Jean Baudrillard is reading Beyond the Looking-Glass

Jacques Derrida’s Glas is half full (but his copula runneth over) 

Alfred Hitchcock is listening to Counting Crows

J. Alfred Prufrock uploaded 1000 insects to his Wall

Dorothy Wordsworth is listening to 
Shakespears Sister



Who?

Adeena Karasick is a media artist, performer, cultural theorist, and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute in New York. Karasick is also co-founding Artistic Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat. In 2017 the Adeena Karasick Archive was established at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.


What?

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces – concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms – that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection.

The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture. As a euphoric parade of “alternative facts” or “fake news,” “Checking In” offers satiric comment on the state of American politics. Each ironically investigative line erupts as a self-reflexive mash-up, speaking to our seemingly insatiable desire for information while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.

The Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. We seek fulfillment but enter an unsettling, uninhibited flow of information in which every data point refers to itself and reinforces a techno-capitalist culture. Checking In founds a site of radical, grafted linkages, codes, indices, ludic identities. An interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, analyses, echoes, and provocations, (re)presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities, its poems are inter-subjective theatres of infinite re-framing. From Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants to bill bissett and Slavoj Žižek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In tours the shards of post-consumerist culture and reminds us we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us, and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking …

Karasick’s words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer’s concoctions; as ever, they’re fun, smart, and topical.


When?

Arriving May 1, 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $16.95.


How?

Luxuriating in the materiality of language.



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

4/16/2018

BC Poetry 2018: "The Girls with Stone Faces" by Arleen Paré (Brick Books)



Fourteen Lines About Beauty
1. A certain charm informs any numerical system.
2. It’s close to beauty, but it is not beauty.
3. A line is only a line, but add a loop, a finale, and you’re almost there.
4. It is not the frog.
5. It is not the bog or the weeds or the wart on the frog.
6. Unless you chose the right angle.
7. Philosophers may struggle; apple blossoms pay no attention.
8. If I kiss you, am I more beautiful.  Are you?
9. If proportion.
10. If contrast, say blue verses orange.
11. There once were clouds of butterflies.  The Italian say farfarelles.
12. Papillion in the French.
13. The end might not be beautiful.  
14. The beginning. Yes, but middle is best. 


Who?

Arleen Paré’s first book, Paper Trail, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2008. Leaving Now, a mixed-genre novel released in 2012, was highlighted on All Lit Up. Lake of Two Mountains, her third book, won the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, was nominated for the Butler Book Prize and won the CBC Bookie Award. Paré’s poetry collection, He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car, was a 2015 Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist. She lives in Victoria with her partner of thirty-seven years. The Girls with Stone Faces is her fifth book.


What?

Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award–winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists — and most importantly their work — to appear in Canada in many years.

Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.


When?

Arrived September 2017.


Where?

Purchase from the Brick Books website or at your local bookstore. $20.


How?

Lifting back into common memory.



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