Word Vancouver - 2016 Program Guide

Row 1: Ariadne Sawyer, Bong Ja Ahn, Hae Young Kim, Kyoung Rae Kim, Anahita Jamali Rad, Kim Fu,
Kevin Spenst; Row 2: Garry Gottfriedson, Timothy Shay, Adrienne Gruber, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Christopher
Levenson, Carla Funk, Rob Taylor; Row 3: Juliane Okot Bitek, Wayde Compton, Raoul Fernandes, Daphne
Marlatt, Jordan Scott, Jordan Abel, bill bissett
ELEMENTS
HOST: JEN CURRIN
12:25 PM Garry Gottfriedson (Kamloops)
Deaf Heaven (Ronsdale Press $15.95)
Follow Garry Gottfriedson in this new collection of combative poems as
he compels us and Heaven to listen to the challenges facing First Nation
communities today. Employing many of the Secwepemc (Shuswap)
images and stories, Gottfriedson takes us inside the rez and into the
rooming houses in the city cores, but always drawing new strength from
the land and the people who have moved upon it. Garry Gottfriedson,
from the Secwepemc Nation (Shuswap), was born and raised, and lives in
Kamloops, BC. His poetry has been nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal
Award and the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award.
12:40 PM Timothy Shay (Vancouver)
The Dirty Knees of Prayer (Caitlin Press $18.00)
The poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer are hot and dark as night rain. A
tide of smoke rises and hovers over the city. These poems speak of sadness
and self-fated things, how the heat blurs everything, the clouds send
shrouds of water down. Here a thin gruel of hope is celebrated and dark
elegies are showcased against the former truculence and lying promises of
history, the placebo of mythology. The wry humour of mourning in an age of
grief. Timothy Shay, author of The Dirty Knees of Prayer, writes and lives
in Vancouver, BC. His work has appeared in Canadian literary magazines,
on CBC Radio, and in Rolling Stone.
12:55 PM Adrienne Gruber (Vancouver)
Buoyancy Control (BookThug $18.00)
Buoyancy Control by Adrienne Gruber presents a fascinating culmination
of land and sea, mind and body. Metaphors of bodies of water (as well as
the creatures that inhabit those spaces) swim through the poems, along
with themes of sexuality, sexual identity, and queerness. Buoyancy Control
is an honest, sometimes humorous, look inside the mind and body of a
woman manoeuvring through experiences of longing, loss, and the fluidity
of sexual identity, presented in a powerfully feminist and unapologetic
poetic voice. Adrienne Gruber is the author of Buoyancy Control (2016),
This Is the Nightmare (2008), and three chapbooks. Gruber lives in Vancouver with her
partner and their two daughters.
Sunrise Suite
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