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April 2014

Wednesday April 23, 2014
Colour + Sound Closing Exhibition Party with bill bissett

Saturday April 26, 2014
Introduction to Poetry with Jordan Abel, an SFU Continuing Studies Course

Saturday April 26, 2014
Adeena Karasick in Providence, Rhode Island

Monday April 28, 2014
Talon Spring 2014 Poetry Launch – Calgary, AB

Wednesday April 30, 2014
Talon Spring 2014 Poetry Launch – Vancouver, BC

May 2014

Thursday May 1, 2014
George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, & Stephen Collis at the Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle

Friday May 2, 2014
Bev Sellars at the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society Conference, Calgary

Saturday May 3, 2014
2014 B.C. Book Prizes Gala

Thursday May 8, 2014
Calgary launch of Ground Rules, featuring derek beaulieu, Natalie Simpson, and Julia Williams

Wednesday May 14, 2014
Adeena Karasick at the Tribeca New Music Festival

Friday May 16, 2014
Natalie Simpson Reads at CCWWP Conference in Vancouver

Friday May 16, 2014
Espresso by Lucia Frangione at the Pacific Theatre, Vancouver

Wednesday May 21, 2014
Lunch Poems at SFU Vancouver with Phinder Dulai and Catriona Strang

Saturday May 24, 2014
“Dead Metaphor” by George F. Walker in Toronto

June 2014

Tuesday June 3, 2014
George F. Walker’s “The Burden of Self-Awareness” in Ottawa, ON

Saturday June 14, 2014
Reading and Recitation in Memory of the Komagata Maru

Friday June 20, 2014
Adeena Karasick in Toronto!

July 2014

Wednesday July 2, 2014
Billy Bishop at the Blyth Festival, Ontario

Sunday July 6, 2014
Performing the Voyage: Legacies and Echoes of the Komagata Maru

August 2014

Monday August 18, 2014
Adeena Karasick at the KlezKanada Poetry Retreat in Quebec

November 2014

Friday November 7, 2014
Adeena Karasick Speaks at Brock University, ON

The Artwork of bill bissett at the Reach Gallery in Abbotsford, BC

This week the Reach Gallery in Abbotsford, B.C. presents the first major showing of bill bissett’s work since the fires in th tempul exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1984! The show opens this Wednesday, April 17 and runs until June 29, 2014.

Right-click to enlarge.

The exhibition, textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett, shows bill’s early assemblages, shadow boxes, paintings, drawings, new and multi-media works from the Vancouver Art Gallery and private collections. Spanning his full vocation as an artist the exhibition will also show bill’s early blewointment publications and first editions from the bissett papers and archives at SFU; it will also try and do more: to create a conversation on modern and contemporary art (“widen the area of consciousness”).

The show will open with a talk and reading by bill bissett at the Western Front in Vancouver on April 18 – this Friday!

See our event listing or the Reach Gallery website for more information.

Hot Off the Presses! Thrum, God and the Indian, DOWNVERSE, and From the Poplars

Spring 2014 poetry has arrived! Thrum by Natalie Simpson, DOWNVERSE by Nikki Reimer, and From the Poplars by Cecily Nicholson are in the house. Order yours today! Or catch these wonderful women reading from these new books at their launches in Calgary or Vancouver.

Talon’s first drama of the season has also arrived: Drew Hayden Taylor’s God and the Indian, a play that explores the aftermath of the residential schools system, what is possible when the abused meets the abuser and is given a free forum for expression.

rob mclennan Interviews Jordan Abel

Today, poet rob mclennan published an interview he conducted with Jordan Abel, author of The Place of Scraps – which has recently been shortlisted for the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry in British Columbia – about his writing process and influences. Here is a little taste of the interview:

rm: the place of scraps is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?

JA: When I originally began putting the manuscript together, my process leaned towards mechanical. To construct a poem, I would scan through Marius Barbeau’s book Totem Poles until I came across a section that spoke to me. Usually, I was looking for a paragraph or two that I could type out in InDesign and subsequently erase. When I found a section that I liked, I would begin by erasing a word, a sentence, or a group of sentences. Sometimes I erased punctuation, letters and parts of letters.

Read the full interview on rob mclennan’s blog.

Look Out for Billy Bishop! The Singing Fighter Pilot Tours Canada in 2014

One of Canada’s favourite perennial plays, Billy Bishop Goes to War, written by John MacLachlan Gray with Eric Peterson, will run in a number of theatres in Canada this year!

A memory play about war, Billy Bishop has been going into battle onstage for more than thirty years, and raises questions about the ironies and the price of survival. The play’s format is deceptively simple with a solo narrator who assumes multiple roles while his piano-playing sidekick offers sardonic musical comments.

CBC Theatre shared a brief interview with the show’s creators about its conception:

Tour dates are as follows:

• April 24–26 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Raw Theatre Productions – more information here)
• July 1–August 9 at the Highlands Summer Festival in Haliburton, Ontario
• July 2–August 17 at the Blyth Festival in Blyth, ON
• July 4–19 at the Rose Theatre in Brampton, ON
• September 27–October 15 at Theatre North West in Prince George, British Columbia
• October 28–November 15 at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton, ON
• November 4–23 at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia

Visit each theatre’s website for tickets and more information.

Today is B.C. Book Day!

The government of British Columbia has declared April 9 as B.C. Book Day! Perhaps today is the day to visit that indie bookstore in your neighbourhood, or pick up that west-coast tome you’ve been eyeing. British Columbia’s book scene is as rich as this beautiful province’s environment and as diverse as it’s cultures, and today we officially celebrate that.

What is B.C. Book Day? From a press release of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia (ABPBC):

The creative industries are hugely important to British Columbia’s economic well-being of which indigenous book publishing is a significant component. With global distribution in both print and digital formats, BC publishing brings our stories to the world. On April 9th the BC Legislature will celebrate the achievements of BC’s publishing industry with a proclamation and an exhibition of BC-published books at the Parliament Buildings in Victoria.

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Three New Arrivals!

The first of Talon’s Spring 2014 poetry has arrived, as have our two novels of the season!

In Corked by Catriona Strang, the speaker responds to Proust and to the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms.

Hitchcock meets Chuck Palahniuk in Larry Tremblay’s”:http://talonbooks.com/authors/larry-tremblay The Obese Christ, translated by Sheila Fischman, is a psycho-sexual thriller that plunges to the roots of good and evil, demonstrating Tremblay’s powerful understanding of the human psyche and its often misguided and unrealized expressions of love and faith. (Read an excerpt here!)

A Matter of Gravity by Hélène Vachon, translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, is a novel about the forces that draw people together and give life meaning. Hermann, an embalmer and a doctor’s son, devotes himself to the dead because, unlike his father, he cannot cure the living. Hu, an ailing concert pianist, dwells in memories of past glory. A mysterious manuscript, possibly written by one of Hermann’s centenarian neighbours, connects one man with the other, and an afternoon at the park eventually leads the two of them back to Hu’s piano. This marks the beginning of an extraordinary relationship that will change both men’s lives.

Listen to Alain Deneault Talk Mining-Industry Policy Injustices on UBC Student Radio

Last week, Landslide Lauren interviewed author Alain Deneault for End of the World News on CiTR (radio 101.9 FM) in Vancouver, the University of British Columbia’s student radio station. Deneault is the author of Imperial Canada Inc., a thorough investigation into one seemingly simple question: why are 75% of the world’s mining companies based in Canada?

Deneault’s work should be of particular interest and have a particular currency with UBC students given that university’s new (and somewhat controversial) mining institute, the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development (CIIEID), which is the project of a variety of stakeholders including the Federal Government, the University of British Columbia, two other Universities, and various other corporate and non-governmental organizations.

Listen to the excellent interview here (the intro begins at 4:40 and the interview itself begins at 45:20).

The Place of Scraps Shortlisted for 2014 Gerald Lampert Award!

Congratulations to Jordan Abel, author of The Place of Scraps, which has this week been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. This award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year and carries a $1,000 prize. This year’s shortlist includes:

• The Place of Scraps by Jordan Abel (Talonbooks)
• Rove by Laurie D. Graham (Hagios Press)
• Light Light by Julie Joosten (BookThug)
• Surge Narrows by Emilia Nielsen (Leaf Press)
• The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild by Murray Reiss (Hagios Press)
• Incarnate by Juleta Severson-Baker (Frontenac House Poetry)

Winners of these awards will be announced during a special ceremony at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference to be held at the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel in downtown Toronto on June 7, 2014. We wish The Place of Scraps the best of luck!

Congratulations to bill bissett, Winner of the 2014 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award!

The League of Canadian Poets and Calgary Spoken Word Festival announced this week that the 2014 recipient of the prestigious Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award is bill bissett!

This award recognizes influence and impact on spoken word in Canada. This $1000.00 annual award was created by Sheri-D Wilson, a pioneer of spoken word poetry in Canada, and it was first presented at the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival in 2007. The award will be presented to bill at the League of Canadian Poets’ Annual Poetry Festival and Conference award gala on June 7, 2014.

It’s Poetry Month!

National Poetry Month kicks off today! The League of Canadian Poets has announced its awards shortlists (which include Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps) and its winners (one of whom is our very own bill bissett!); the Council of Arts for Ottawa has nominated Talon poet rob mclennan for its Mid-Career Artist Award; and the B.C. Book Prizes have included The Place of Scraps on their shortlist for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Evidently the celebration of poetry is well under way!

Talon, too, has good poetry-related things in store this month: pre-order Corked, Downverse, From the Poplars, or Thrum today; they are due to arrive from the presses over the next few weeks. Later this month, catch all four of our Spring 2014 poets – Cecily Nicholson, Nikki Reimer, Natalie Simpson, and Catriona Strang – who will launch their new books in Calgary on April 28 (at the Palomino Smokehouse) and in Vancouver on April 30 (at Pyatt Hall). The wonderful M.A.C. Farrant will also be at these launches, reading from her new book of miniatures, The World Afloat.

What more can we say for now? Perhaps we could share this clarion call, in the form of excerpts from the first poem in Internodes by Ken Belford (published Fall 2013):

Give the word, and disperse early
and displace often. Let gaps fly
open.
…
… and breathe,
and be something more than
the immediate, repetitious sample.

Happy Poetry Month!

Excerpt from God and the Indian

The latest play by Drew Hayden Taylor is now available! Below is an extract from God and the Indian to wet your whistle.

GEORGE: You followed me from … from the Tim Hortons?

JOHNNY: Yep. I recognized you.

GEORGE: Really, I don’t think we’ve ever met. I’m new to the diocese.

JOHNNY: Oh, we met. Long time ago. Me, I’ve changed a bit since the last time you saw me.

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Poem: “cherree blossoms” by bill bissett

For Meta-Talon this week, a perfectly “in season” poem for spring – especially if you are in the Vancouver area, as Talon is. Enjoy!

cherree blossoms

blankit barclay street
 pink snow on our bureed
      dreems
 that eezee 2 start

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Extracts From From the Poplars by Cecily Nicholson

The following are excerpts from From the Poplars, the latest book of poetry by Cecily Nicholson, which has recently arrived from the press in a few weeks (order yours today!).

Poplar Island pop patri individuated alike

lazaretto
Kamau Taurua, North Brother,
Angel our current

worse conditions of confinement

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Still in Stitches from the Poetry Is Dead Humour Issue Launch

Last evening the funniest, saddest, loneliest, and most lovably obnoxious poets and comedians gathered for the launch of the latest issue – the Humour issue – of Poetry is Dead magazine at Performance Works on Granville Island in Vancouver. Among the performers were Talon poets George Bowering, Dina Del Bucchia, and Daniel Zomparelli (editor-in-chief of Poetry is Dead).

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