Sunday, October 3 at Collected Works
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Terry Ann Carter and Frances Boyle read at Collected Works – 2:00 p.m.
Poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A Song for Simone”– a conversation between the poet and French mystical philosopher Simone Weil. Originally from Western Canada, Lorri Neilsen Glenn now lives in Halifax and spends her summers in Saskatchewan. The author of many academic books and two previous books of poetry (all the perfect disguises, 2003, and Combustion, 2007), she served as Poet Laureate for Halifax from 2005-2009.
Terry Ann Carter’s third collection of poetry A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press) will be launched in Windsor this autumn. Her chapbook, A Monk’s Fine Robes: Haiku from Cambodia, is forthcoming from Leaf Press, Victoria, B.C. Carter has served Ottawa as the Random Acts of Poetry poet for the past five years.
Frances Boyle’s fiction and poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Room (and its predecessor Room of One’s Own), Arc, Contemporary Verse 2, and Prairie Fire, and the anthology In Fine Form, The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Her poem “Momentum”, which won the Diana Brebner Prize, was also long-listed for Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009. She received second place in Prairie Fire’s Banff Centre/Bliss Carmen Award. Frances is happily at home in Ottawa, but draws on her still-strong ties to Regina and Vancouver.
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A reading with 4 readers at Collected Works, the evening of October 5, 2010, 7:30
East Meets West II: Ariel Gordon, Tracy Hamon. Christine McNair and Pearl Pirie
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. She has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press, 2008) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press, 2009) and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms..
Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010) is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to represent adequately the wonder and devilment of being with child. Hump is a love poem written to a father and child, to a lover with a glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty and faded but still greener than most.
Tracy Hamon was born in Regina, SK and grew up traveling between Regina and her parents’ farm near Edenwold, Saskatchewan. She holds a BA Hon and a MA in English with a creative option at the U of R. She is currently the Program Officer for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. Most recently, she started a reading series in Regina called the Vertigo Reading Series. Her poetry has appeared in numerous Canadian literary magazines including Grain, Wascana Review, A Room of One’s Own, sub-TERRAIN, and Event as well as numerous anthologies. Recently her manuscript of poetry on Egon Schiele was short- listed for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards. Her first book of poetry This Is Not Eden was released in April 2005 and was a finalist for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Portions of her latest collection, Interruptions in Glass (Coteau Books, 2010), won the 2005 City of Regina Writing Award.
Interruptions in Glass (Coteau Books, 2010) bites down on the metaphors memory stores, exploring perceptions of everyday exchanges, familial relationships, loves, and losses. Is the language of our aging hysterical or historical? These poems supply a manual of conversations, studying the present by peeling back the past, letter by letter. Snowmen, plays, rice and even disappointment are some of the images that provide places for readers to park and devour the connections. It talks us through the metallic moments we continue to consume on the journey.
Christine McNair‘s work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, CV2, the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Descant and a few other places. Her poems were featured in Dalhousie Blues, a collaborative project with Sean Moreland, Jamie Bradley and Caleb JW Brasset (ex-hubris press, 2009). Her work was also included in the Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House, 2010) and Rogue Stimulus (Mansfield Press, 2010) anthologies. She is one of the hosts of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes program and works as a book doctor in Ottawa.
Ottawa-valley born, poet Pearl Pirie has had poems appear thru dandelion, ditch, PRECIPICe, Dusie, 17 Seconds, 1cent, and Ottawater. Her chapbooks include over my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010) and boathouse (above/ground, 2008). Just returned from Sage Hill, she is currently working on a couple collections as well as her usual several blogs. Her upcoming collection ‘been shed bore’ (Chaudiere Books, 2010) includes plunderverse, zips, remixes and a sonnet redoublé. In a poetry built on the strength of play, Pirie’s writing moves at the speed of sound, slipping up against silence. The poems in the collection are eccentric and perceptive. It is an examination of nation telescoping from the immediate macro view and the distance after historical calm. The combination of landscape poems and plunder makes for an original take on our world.