Word Vancouver - 2016 Program Guide

1:10 PM Elee Kraljii Gardiner (Vancouver) Adopted by: Anvil Press
Serpentine Loop (Anvil Press $18.00)
Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to
another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control, and language
as pattern; visit the past through movement; or enact principles from
the rink, such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent,
revolution, and response. The blade melts ice via friction and pressure.
Elee Kraljii Gardiner founded and directs Thursdays Writing Collective, a
program of free creative writing classes in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
She is co-editor of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
OUR WORLD
HOST: MICHAEL DESPOTOVIC
1:30 PM Christopher Levenson (Vancouver)
Night Vision (Quattro Books $18.00)
The title Night Vision refers to the night-vision goggles that enable soldiers
to see through the darkness in order to destroy and kill, to a vision of the
political and ecological night that threatens humankind, and to the faint
possibility, grounded in personal relationships and cultural values, that we
will see through and somehow transcend this night. The book is a major
expression by a veteran poet of searchingly reflective and finely articulated
thought. Christopher Levenson taught English and creative writing at
Carleton University, in Ottawa. His collection Arriving at Night won the
Archibald Lampman Award. He co-founded and was the first editor of Arc
Magazine.
1:45 PM Carla Funk (Victoria)
Gloryland (Turnstone Press $17.00)
In her fifth book of poetry, Carla Funk illuminates the small and marvellous
marginalia of earth, like the glistening trail of a snail en route, and looks
prophetically to the not-so-distant future where cities burn and the body
falls to ruin. A meditation on endings, intermingling wonder and praise with
question and elegy, Gloryland offers poems for an apocalyptic age. Born
and raised in Vanderhoof, BC, Carla Funk now lives and teaches writing in
Victoria, where she served as the city’s inaugural poet laureate from 2006
to 2008.
2:00 PM Rob Taylor (Vancouver)
The News (Gaspereau Press $18.95)
The News is a series of 36 poems, written one per week throughout the
author’s wife’s pregnancy with their first child. The poems explore three
forms of “news”—the news of the pregnancy, the political news of the
day, and literature (the “news that stays news,” as Ezra Pound put it).
Collectively, the poems ask what it means to receive the world, and what it
means to give that “news” to somebody else. Rob Taylor is the author of
two poetry collections, The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and The Other
Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). He teaches creative writing at
the University of the Fraser Valley.
Sunrise Suite
More Poetry
Love poetry? In addition to the programming in the Sunrise Suite
(page 56), be sure to check out Wednesday programming at The
Emerald (page 6), Thursday programming at The Cottage Bistro
(page 8), and Sunday programming in The Underground
(pages 62–63) for more!
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