Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver BC | RECENddT EVENTS Jan 05, 08 to Jul 04, 08

Jaspreet Singh is the author of Chef, a novel, and Seventeen Tomatoes, a collection of linked stories which was awarded the 2004 McAuslan Best First Book Prize. His work has appeared in Walrus, Alphabet City, ArtsEtc Cricket Anthology, and Francis Ford Coppolas Zoetrope. He recently finished writing Speak Oppenheimer, a play for Montreals Infinite Theatre. He was the 2006-07 Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.

JULIA WILLIAMS is a poet and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Literary Review of Canada, Matrix Magazine and CV2, and was selected for the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Her first book of poetry, The Sink House, was published by Coach House Books in 2004. She lives in Calgary.

NATALIE SIMPSON's first collection of poetry, accrete or crumble, was published by LINEbooks in 2006. above/ground press recently reissued her chapbook Dirty Work as part of its Alberta Series. More of her poetry can be found in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press) and Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry (Talonbooks). She is a former managing editor of filling Station magazine, and she recently started publishing limited edition chapbooks through her press, edits all over.

Mark Salerno was born in New York City in 1956. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. From 1993 to 1999, he edited Arshile: A Magazine of the Arts, published in Los Angeles. Arshile quickly gained recognition as one of the most influential and innovative small press magazines of its time by publishing a wide array of poetry, fiction, drama, essay, review, and interview. Arshile also featured world-class cover art by such artists as Jasper Johns, Willem De Kooning and Wayne Thiebaud, and inside art by Yoko Ono, Roy Dowell and Emerson Woelffer. In 1995, Mark Salerno published _Hate_ (96 Tears Press), a book of poems. Although _Hate_ grained critical recognition as a serious collection of verse by a new voice, some bookstores refused to stock it, citing its title and cover art as incorrect. The poet went on to publish _For Revery_ (a+bend press, 2000), _Method_ (The Figures, 2002), which was a Finalist in the National Poetry Series, _Matters_ (The Dozens Press, 2002), _So One Could Have_ (Red Hen Press, 2004), and _Odalisque_ (Salt Publishing, 2007). John Ashbery has called Mark Salerno brilliant & an original. He is the recipient of a Fund for Poetry award.

On _Odalisque_:

In this superb new book, Mark Salerno questions the place of value in a world of sequels and simulacra. _Odalisque_ submits repetition to novel, unpredictable forms of renewal a pantoum of the quotidian. Salerno's tightly wrought poems probe the interstices between seeming and being, between Hollywood and the stars, between desire and attendant clamor. If Ingres had placed his Odalisque on the Sunset Strip, she might be looking at us through these poems. This is a completely original work by a serious, important poet.

- Michael Davidson

JEANNE HEUVING's cross genre Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a Book of the Year Award in 2005 from Small Press Traffic, and her book of poems Transducer (Chax Press) is just out. She has published critical pieces on avant garde and innovative writers, including the book Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. She is concluding work on a new book The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry, focusing on the poetics of Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan as well as several contemporary poets.

from FURROW

How all is a fertile field ever threatening
Plowed too close like an ominous sky
Earth ever opened the possibility of
Into the plowed furrowed lined earth
A fertile plow into the staid forestation
Into the silvered peat moss lined with
A jewelry box felted with diamonds

...

the possibility of light falling onto his face
the possibility of walking into a sunlit alcove
the sunlit alcove fitting rippling like a glove
the glove moving from finger tip to forearm
silky on flesh receptive to being touched
harvested when a light brown will turn black
deadening hollow black seeds refusing

__________

What does not go away this
Mascared eyes, Cleopatra
Charcoaled Marlene Dietrich
Wanting at the grave as it
Leaks light

***

MEREDITH QUARTERMAINs most recent book is Vancouver Walking; it won the BC Book Awards 2006 Poetry Prize. Two new books by Quartermain are coming out this year: Matter from Bookthug (spring 2008), and Nightmarker from NeWest (fall 2008). She and husband Peter Quartermain run Nomados Literary Publishers in Vancouver.

from THE RAWS

If city is figure what is ground?

20,000 tons of brown sugar, four stories high, land gifted from city to sugar factory with tax breaks and free water. Every few minutes, a man with an earth mover scoops three tons of raws into a hopper.

1890s: men hauled 700-pound baskets from ships. Picked and sawed like miners at brown boulders in cavernous warehouses. Factory paid managing director $5000 a year, plus $20,000 bonus in 1892, same year it paid $18,000 in dividends.

Cutting up, distributing pieces, classifying, parting, disuniting, subjecting to division.

Can you divide figure from ground? What's individual and not divisible?

1916 $400,000 in dividends. 1917 280% dividend. Same year factory workers struck three months for a 10% raise.

Bonusing: (1) rewards to directors or managers; (2) the use of public money to set up private companies. 1890-city raising $30,000 with 5% debentures, buying sugar-land from mayor's land company, hiring contractors to clear it. On plantations, thirty slaves with hoes trenched two acres a day, planting cane 1.4 million Cormantins, Papaws, Ibos, Bantus shipped to sugar islands 300,000 dying at sea.

Join the Kootenay School of Writing and New Star Books in celebrating the launch of Maxine Gadd's new book SUBWAY UNDER BYZANTIUM.

*

in the backwoods

across rainy Georgia Strait from dominatrix city on an island amongst
islands known for thousands of years, a two hour walk on small settled
roads to the beginning of a forest under a green mountain cradling a dark
green cove, an old orchard and meadow sloping northwest, a run down
yellow house, many collapsing outhouses, tool sheds, wood sheds, chicken
coops, garages carpeted about with exquisitely disintegrating components
of antique internal combustion motors: springs and levers, axles separated
from wheels, bolts, wires, nails, blades rusting into the colour of the cedar
bark browse

back of all that, a cabin with a woodpile, axes, wedges, mauls, saws,
black nights, fire, silence, soft cries of owls and wounded deer, fire, and
neighbours' tales

- from Backup to Babylon

Come celebrate the launch of Colin Browne's latest book The Shovel, with an extensive reading from the new work.

Co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing, COLIN BROWNE is an educator, documentary filmmaker and the author of numerous books of poetry including Ground Water, nominated for a Governor General's award in 2002.

"The skill and intense ardor of the mind at work is delightful." - Fred Wah

Join the Kootenay School of Writing and Line Books to celebrate the launch of Kim Minkus' new book 9 FREIGHT, with a readings by Minkus and Emily Fedoruk.

Privacy is very important. The saliva glints off his teeth. he tells me about the glass elevator to my rooftop entrance. He keeps touching and tells me the prices are no dirty secret. Indelible ink squirts from his pen. 5% down in a seamless blend of shiny 80s decor. Urban fare available just doors away, deliverable and bookable theatre. private porno party and doing it in the seats. He wants to get dirty with me. One scar at a time. Fresh-cut flowers loll in the crystal. The plate of sweets is inedible. The model tower a silver sliver in the glass case. The tiny trees remind me of candy. There are so many things I'd like to pop in my mouth. everything in the private cabana and with meticulous attention to detail.

How delicate. A towering tumble of accumulation. I gloss and glow in the
architrave. The fringes of fun gather at my sleeves. I puzzle my way out
of commitments. I peel the paint from the pilaster. Flattened and
abbreviated I am more frivolous than any commodity.

I can only guess at new forms of employment.

1. hip to be swear
new year a new west state of mind of rest and illusions solution she says, at the level of the word. for those who sling it in all the right type
right
say
see me in the city
sitting pretty
tongues slip; the space among those teeth
stiff parts of paper stacked silence, so
do you wanna write this
off or just fuck it
found text, lost my page

okay, emily, walk away

Startled by the décor of the logic gates a portrait stands tall with the genial spirit. Black plastic patent pending the diameter of your wrist - about three inches small. Its vinyl bindings pinch the thighs - running down the double wide. An optical cable. Rods of refracted light marbled between cork and wainscot. Logic as such lines up watching subroutines work their way to the top.

Already written, the book talks back but with different hair.

It has knobs on. It takes its miniature fabrics off. Hollow when sawed through - a Ken doll with plastic flesh. These contradictions only prove K exists. The illusion of an argument alive in the eye. Feeling an arc that guides each step. The constraint of a three-legged race. Or a tumbling apart that produced silence.

We've become there - as adjacents. Ready to wear. Enacted in body words populate the gestures that own us.

- Robert Mittenthal, "Blandiloquence"

ROBERT MITTENTHAL is a curator of Seattle's Subtext reading series, and the author of Martyr Economy, Ready Terms (Tsunami), the recent chapbook Value Unmapped (Nomados), and the forthcoming Wax World (Chax).

*

&when obscenely further back, malefic
democracy broken open,
optionally steps through you
disappearing in the dips
and the bourgeois body
pursued to the limits of faded money
wills not
to jump its shark

impressed into the radiation
a single torrential fusion
draws aside panoptic
collapse of time and space
by none
exacted with more rigor

we, who go through the day
as yet unmingled in ceaseless flux
all the dead darkness
skyward...working the vault

- Lissa Wolsak, from "THRALL"

LISSA WOLSAK is a poet, goldsmith and energy~thought therapist in Vancouver, B.C. She has published several essays and long poem sequences, at times crossing these genres in works such as An Heuristic Prolusion. Her books include The Garcia Family Co-Mercy, Pen Chants or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences, A Defence of Being (sic), and Squeezed Light: Collected Works 1994-2006.

DAVID BATEMAN is a spoken word/performance artist who has performed his work across the country. His two collections of poetry (Invisible Foreground, 2004; Impersonating Flowers, 2006) have been published by Frontenac House Press, Calgary. Bateman received a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary in 2001 and teaches literature and creative writing at a variety of post-secondary institutions. Based in Toronto, he is currently teaching in the Cultural Studies Department at Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario).

ASHOK MATHUR is a poet, prose writer, and multi-media artist. Born in Bhopal, India, he immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of one and now divides his time between Vancouver and Kamloops, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry at Thompson Rivers University. His first novel, Once Upon an Elephant, is being adapted for film. His most recent book, The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar, is a playful blending of the Hindu epic The Ramayana with the geography of Canada and Australia. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He is currently working on two manuscripts: A Little Distillery in Nowgong (prose) and muerte por tres / more patois (poetry).