Crossing a Grave in Harmonium by David Groulx (phafours press, 2020) has 18 deft, moving and lacerating poems. Here’s one: Daydreaming in Blood My blood’s red like a star dying like the marsh inside my veins the horses, much, shoulder deep heaving out a single thoughts: blood, a place I sometimes go $12 including domestic […]
Tag archives: poetry
footlights coming
Pearl Pirie’s 4th poetry collection, footlights, is “ lyric grief-work, and joy-work, loss, resilience and finding small beauties”. It releases in October 2020. Preorder to receive it first! Show me you and your copy and I’ll send you book swag: footlights: the colouring book. Ask your local library for copies. Give it for all the seasonal holidays! Review it and […]
95Books CWILA Self-Audit
Alright, I admit I’m bogged. I have a couple dozen books left to summarize from last year and the year is getting on. I don’t know if I can pare out the time before February. Following it is the breakdown on self-audit on categories of reading. In 2014 I read 144 titles, which is only […]
95 Books for 2014, List 3, Vividly Living
I’m at least a dozen or so behind in my listing books completed. I’ll try to chunk these into smaller lengths so each instalment is only a few instead of pages of scroll. The Hottest Summer in Recorded History by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Nightwood, 2013) It feels more like a book than most, not in the […]
Cento and Self-Expression
A cento is a poem form where you also don’t use any of your own words. You have stacks of books that get passed around and perhaps on a 5 minute or 15 minute timer you grab and transcribe on your page. The object is to pull what stands out verbatim and move to the […]
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Tune in online or on radio to CKCU Literary Landscape tomorrow at 6:30pm to hear an interview with this treasure of a poet, Souvankham Thammavongsa. We talk about the video projects with Kat Burns and Paramita Nath ( You can see the short films based on her poems here.), about the nature of making words […]
Tree Seed Workshops: Overview
Often when a feature reader comes from out of town to present at the Tree Reading Series they remark something along the lines of: that was a fantastic open mic. Usually you have to suffer through those but I got something out of each reader. Back in 2009 Rod Pederson was the director at Tree […]
Political Poems: Panel with Wah, Brossard and Brand
Nicole Brossard, Fred Wah and Dionne Brand fielding questions from the audience while on panel. Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah organized this salon that to present The Political Poem with Nicole Brossard and Dionne Brand, “two of Canada’s most outstanding textual activists. Though the range of their writing is expansive, including novels, essays, collaborations, and […]