some author activity: Mohammadi, Robinson, carisse, Campanello + Williams,

Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi is interviewed with Klara du Plessis in the latest issue of The Temz Review, where Ben Robinson is also interviewed, and russell carisse also has new work; Kimberly Campanello and Wayne A. Gilbert's 2023 conversation "Moving Nowhere Here" is up on YouTube; and Evan Williams has some new work up at Tyger Quarterly.

some author activity: Saklikar, Barwin, Siklosi, Campanello, Unsworth + a report on Yee & du Plessis @ VERSeFest

the Surrey Now-Leader writes on the end of Renée Sarojini Saklikar's three-year term as Surrey, British Columbia's first City Poet Laureate; Gary Barwin is interviewed over at talking about strawberries all of the time, where Kate Siklosi, Kimberly Campanello and forthcoming author Lydia Unsworth also have new work; and Manahil Bandukwala was good enough to blog about VERSeFest, including The Factory Reading Series event, featuring lectures by Sennah Yee and Klara du Plessis!

The Factory Reading Series @ VERSeFest: Hoa Nguyen + Klara du Plessis, March 24, 2018!

The Factory Reading Series
as part of the eighth annual VERSeFest poetry festival presents:

The Factory Reading Series Lecture Series, two talks and readings by:

Hoa Nguyen (Toronto)
Klara du Plessis (Montreal)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Saturday, March 24, 2018
1pm at Knox Presbyterian Church, 120 Lisgar St. Ottawa
$10 at the door / check link for info on passes: http://versefest.ca/year/2018/tickets/
and check the VERSeFest link for the full schedule of readers and events!
http://versefest.ca/year/2018/
March 20-25, 2018

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen [pictured] lives in Toronto where she teaches creative writing in multiple settings. Her books include As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots, nominated for a 2017 Griffin Prize for poetry.
http://versefest.ca/year/2018/poet/?id=257

Klara du Plessis is a poet and critic residing in Montreal. Her debut collection, Ekke, has just been released from Palimpsest Press; and her chapbook, Wax Lyrical—shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award—was published by Anstruther Press, 2015. Klara curates the Resonance Reading Series, and is the editor for carte blanche. Follow her @ToMakePoesis
http://versefest.ca/year/2018/poet/?id=231

Klara du Plessis reviews Stephanie Bolster's Three Bloody Words (2016) at Broken Pencil

Montreal poet Klara du Plessis was good enough to provide the first review of Stephanie Bolster's Three Bloody Words: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2016) over at Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

Three Bloody Words
Stephanie Bolster, 23 pgs, above/ground press, abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca, $5

This is an anniversary publication, a reissue twenty years after the original release, celebrating Stephanie Bolster’s chapbook Three Bloody Words—a sequence of poems and short paragraphs aiming to rewrite well-known fairytales from the perspective of the princess. In an new afterword, Bolster describes her feminist project and her desire “to reclaim women’s narratives … I was, simply and sincerely, claiming identity as a writer. In giving these women a voice, I was giving myself one.”

Modeled as retellings of fairytales, these pieces are thematically linked by their consistent exposure of the latent violence inherent to so-called children’s stories—“To think they read these stories to children” being one of the poem’s titles. While the fairytales are never named, the narratives are presumably so familiar to most readers that select elements are enough to clue in reader that, for example, a man lurking in the forest, threatening a girl dressed in red, is most probably based on Little Red Riding Hood. Similarly, a girl with “snow-white skin/ blood-red cheeks, hair as black as ebony” is sufficient to position the under-aged, coerced and subsequently vengeful child bride as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

What sets Bolster’s retellings apart from similar work by, for instance, Anne Sexton, is her insistence on the contemporaneous nature of the narratives. When “this guy in a suit comes & asks what’s it like being in fairytales he’s doing his thesis,” it becomes clear that the entitled, patriarchal, often aggressive and nonconsensual archetype of the Disney prince has just changed his guise for modern times; “it was the same old story.” The legendary “happily ever after” postures as the continuity of fairytale violence and inequality into the present day.

Klara du Plessis reviews Sean Braune's the vitamins of an alphabet (2016) in Broken Pencil

Klara du Plessis was good enough to provide the first review of Sean Braune's the vitamins of an alphabet (2016) in Broken Pencil. Thanks much! You can see the review here. As she writes:

the vitamins of an alphabet starts in medias res. There is no title page. There is no title for the first poem. In fact, the first word of the first poem isn’t even capitalized, although the other poems in the collection abide by this convention. Sean Braune’s chapbook of poems launches itself as if it weren’t really the beginning, but rather an “alphabetic terrarium” – the poems are kept safe inside the physical form of this little book, but they exist equally off of the page and out in the real world. As Braune inquires: “Do the letters or languages live? / Do they exists beyond this typing.”

Braune enlivens language. Words grow organically (perhaps enriched by the “green, leafy / vegetable / vitamins / of an alphabet”) into each other based on sound or the concrete shape on the page rather than meaning: “a lattice work, but the lettuce effects no nourishment because a cause is a use of being a caucus of tic tac toe cacti / causus belli.” the vitamins of an alphabet is a playful treatise on the arbitrary nature of orthography. Indeed, in the section “Four Variations on the Signifier,” Braune further explores the conflict between the abstraction of language and the empirical world with a set of images labeled as modifications of the word “signifier,” such as “Signifire” or “Signifrier.” Now serious linguistic terminology evokes images of sausages on a grill. Braune’s poems are an equal mix of theory and jokester.