Recent Events
January 05, 2008 to July 04, 2008
June 06, 2008
Jaspreet Singh
Details
April 26, 2008
Natalie Simpson
Julia Williams
Details
April 17, 2008
Mark Salerno
Details
April 11, 2008
Jeanne Heuving
Meredith Quartermain
Details
February 29, 2008
Maxine Gadd
Details
February 28, 2008
Colin Browne
Details
February 23, 2008
Emily Fedoruk
Kim Minkus
Details
January 26, 2008
Robert Mittenthal
Lissa Wolsak
Details
January 17, 2008
Tom Cruise
Details
January 11, 2008
David Bateman
Ashok Mathur
Details
Jaspreet Singh
Read at
Radha Eatery
Friday, June 06, 2008
launching his new book CHEF
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.
Natalie Simpson
Julia Williams
Read at
Spartacus Books
Saturday, April 26, 2008
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
Read at
Kootenay School of Writing
Thursday, April 17, 2008
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
Meredith Quartermain
Read at
Spartacus Books
Friday, April 11, 2008
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.
Maxine Gadd
Read at
Spartacus Books
Friday, February 29, 2008
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
*
"Maxine Gadd is one of the best poets in Canada [and] the truth is we
don't have a Maxine Gadd equivalent in the United States. If only we
had! We might be a more progressive nation, and our children might be
writing much better poetry." - Kevin Killian
*
Born in the UK, Maxine Gadd was a red diaper baby who moved to
Canadas west coast with her family as a child. Her writing reflects an
engagement with contemporary art and critical movements, alongside a
connection to neighbourhood and community. Like many of her generation,
she spent much of her young adulthood in motion, and lived on the Gulf
Islands for significant stretches before settling into her adopted
community in Vancouvers Downtown Eastside. She credits the Kootenay
School of Writing with introducing her to many of the writers who fed
her during the period between the publication of Lost Language (1982)
and Backup to Babylon (2006). That latter book was shortlisted for a BC
Book Prize for poetry in 2007.
Colin Browne
Read at
Spartacus Books
Thursday, February 28, 2008
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
Emily Fedoruk
Kim Minkus
Read at
Spartacus Books
Saturday, February 23, 2008
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.
- Kim Minkus, from CONDO
***
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
- Emily Fedoruk, from cirrus
EMILY FEDORUK
is a poet, dancer and bookstore cashier living in New Westminster. She
studies English and Art and Culture at SFU and will pursue MA work next
fall. Two recently published chapbooks, street still and still
building, will be soon followed by a third.
KIM MINKUS is
a poet, librarian and perpetual student, currently working on her Ph.D.
in the department of English at SFU. In April 2006 she was awarded a
library archives visiting fellowship to King's College, London. Her
research was both academic and creative and led to the creation of the
poems that appear in 9 FREIGHT.
Robert Mittenthal
Lissa Wolsak
Read at
Spartacus Books
Saturday, January 26, 2008
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.
Tom Cruise
Read at
Proprioception Books
Thursday, January 17, 2008
David Bateman
Ashok Mathur
Read at
Spartacus Books
Friday, January 11, 2008
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).
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