PAST STORE EVENTS

Speaking Crow

Aqua Books is pleased to be the permanent home of the venerable poetry series Speaking Crow. The Crow starts at 7pm and is followed by two open-mic sets and short breaks in between. Come take up the mic and wax poetic about life, the universe and everything!

For upcoming Speaking Crows, click here.

Tuesday, March 2/10 7pm

Featured reader: Joanne Epp

Aqua Books is pleased to be the permanent home of the venerable poetry series Speaking Crow. The Crow starts at 7pm and is followed by two open-mic sets and short breaks in between. Come take up the mic and wax poetic about life, the universe and everything!

Joanne Epp is a Winnipeg writer whose poetry has appeared in CV2, Other Voices and other literary publications. She is currently working on her first book of poems. Her book reviews have appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, Prairie Fire Review of Books, and most recently, the Globe and Mail. She is an alumnus of the Sage Hill Writing Experience and the Manitoba Writers' Guild mentorship program. Joanne is the mother of two young sons, a big fan of Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, and assistant organist at St. Margaret's church.

For previous Speaking Crows, go to our Dead Crows page.

Tuesday, February 2/10 7pm

Featured reader: Kegan McFadden

Kegan McFadden is a Winnipeg-based writer, curator, and artist. His experimental and minimalist writing has appeared in FRONT and GEIST magazines. Chapbooks to his credit include: twenty-four love poems [2004], everything i heard while not listening to what you had to say ... [2005], and Parlour Games [2007] all published by As We Try & Sleep Press. As invited reader for Speaking Crow this February, he'll be reading a selection of previously unpublished poems that explore relationships between men, as well as soppy investigations into place.

Tuesday, January 5/10 7pm

Featuring: Poor Tree Collective

Poor Tree is a collective currently consisting of Christoff Engbrecht and David Streit. (Third founding member Michael Goertzen now lives in Istanbul.) Poor tree uses old typewriters, portable turntables and other accessories to create their sound art. They have performed at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and Element Circus, and have also been featured in CV2.

Tuesday, December 1/09 7pm

Featured reader: Margaret Sweatman

Margaret Sweatman is a playwright, poet, performer and novelist. Her plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra and the National Academy Orchestra, as well as with her own Broken Songs Band. Margaret Sweatman is the author of the novels Fox, Sam and Angie and When Alice Lay Down with Peter, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year. Her long-awaited new novel, The Players, has just been released by Goose Lane Editions.

Tuesday, November 3/09 7pm

Featured reader: Sharon Caseburg

Sharon Caseburg is a Winnipeg-based writer, editor and book designer who splits her time between producing other people’s books and writing her own. Her poetry and critical writing have appeared in numerous Canadian publications. She is co-founder of the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. sleepwalking, a long poem, was published by JackPine Press in spring of 2009.

Tuesday, October 6/09 7pm

Featured reader: Rebecca Widdicombe

Rebecca Widdicombe is a fourth-year English student at the University of Winnipeg. She has spent three years studying under poet and novelist Catherine Hunter. Over the course of her poetic meanderings Rebecca has completed three poetry cycles, “20 Poems for the Sea” (an exploration of desire, backpacking, and salt), “All Our Infidelities” (a character-driven, narrative cycle about divorce), and “Missing Woman” (a fragmented saga of five friends and their mutual despair). Rebecca has worked alongside playwright Carolyn Gray, read with local poets Maurice Mierau, Sally Ito, and Joanne Epp, created a Steinian textual mannequin that was exhibited at the 2009 Carol Shields Symposuim, and held an Artist Residency at the Tallest Poppy alongside Australian visual artist Anna Cocks.

Tuesday, September 1/09 7pm

Featured reader: Dennis Cooley

Dennis Cooley, a native of Saskatchewan, has lived for many years in Winnipeg where he teaches, edits, and writes. His latest book is correction line (Thistledown, 2008).

Tuesday, June 2/09 7pm

Featured reader: Méira Cook

Méira Cook is the author of 3 full-length collections of poetry, several chapbooks, and the novel The Blood Girls (NeWest Press, 1998).

Her most recent poetry book Slovenly Love (Brick Books, 2003) is a collection of 5 long poems that display a generous and theatricalized sentience, along with a wry and pixilated humour, even when the emotions and subject matter are despairing.

Her critical book, Writing Lovers: Reading Canadian Love Poetry by Women, came out in 2005 from McGill-Queen's University Press. She is also the editor of Field Marks, a selection of poetry by Don McKay published in the Wilfred Laurier University Press Poetry Series in 2006.

In spring 2008 one of Méira Cook's poems donned wheels and accompanied Winnipeg bus riders as one of the 8 winners of the Poetry in Motion contest. She has also been known to teach creative writing courses at the University of Manitoba.

Tuesday, May 5/09 7pm

Featured reader: Arthur Adamson

Arthur Adamson, over the duration of a long life in Winnipeg, has been absorbed by and contributed to the twain strains of poetry and visual art. There are 3 volumes of verse out there with his name on them: The Inside Animal (Turnstone Press, 1977), Passages of Winter (Turnstone Press, 1981), and Bird Beast and Lover (Editions Ink Inc., 1994). Would it surprise no one to know that all 3 books are heartily illustrated, often in Woodcut Style.

And of the poems? They are curiously wrought, dualistic beasts. Adamson's is a deeply expressive and inquisitive sensibility, and the poems reflect a wrestling match between the highly philosophical and the rankly animistic. Often mythical yet set in present-day prairie circumstances. Some are grimly funny. All have more movement and texture than any reader could know what to do with.

Thought can crack skulls,
break swift bodies of animals,
all images haunting sleep:
ghosts slipping along the blood
contain the dread and the link
from father to son, but awake,
these drift, lost, until, shored
wreckage in history, stab
toothed ribs towards some sky
indifferent to monster and rock.

      (from "The Angel")

Retired now from pedagogy, Arthur Adamson gets his canoe out on the river as often as possible.

Tuesday, April 7/09 7pm

Featured reader: Andris Taskans

Andris Taskans born and stayed put in Winnipeg, has helped create, manage, and edit Prairie Fire magazine for over 30 years. Which is a manifest history --- the barbed wire fence around a prairie field, if you like. What is subterranean is that he's also been a poet. Jukebox Junkie, a chapbook of his verse, was published by Turnstone Press in 1987.

What can be found of Taskans-the-poet are texts of no small acuity and slyness. Master of the short line and the one-word title. Poetic obsessions seem to include camping expeditions, fishing, beaches and lakes, a love of dragonflies, eros, winter, plus more dragonflies. There are some deeply poignant poems about a dying mother.

Taskans writes a straightforward lyric that has emotional complications and subtle sonics. When he brings classical reference into it, he mutates them into bits that are puckishly funny:

        She is a burnt out neon
        queen He's an illiterate
        of the flesh Please
        listen to me, she begs
        Your skin weeps
        for your soul, he says
        There's a little bit of jello
        in each of us, the tv smirks
        and so we spend
        our pagan years

                (from "Shadows")

Andris Taskans told me he's written not a single poem since Jukebox Junkie came out. Who knows whether he ever shall? The occasion of this reading may prove to be A Very Singular Thing.

Tuesday, March 3/09 7pm

Featured reader: Katherena Vermette

Katherena Vermette is one of the younger hotshots in the Aboriginal Writers Collective. No spiney book out yet, but her poems have popped up all over the place, most often in Juice and Prairie Fire.

Vermette knows how to spin the syntax out as well as yank on its choke collar. She writes poems that are cityscapes, love affairs, stories of relations. A wry sensibility that works sweet & hard a jumpy kind of metaphorical wit:

      buildings tower
      windows jump
      a choreographed city performs

            (from "night poem 1")

Her elegies for friends who have died are particularly fine:

      these many men
      intended mentors
      who should have been elders
      brazen with age

      but we lost you as warriors
      shamelessly young with crooked lips
      and faraway eyes
      that saw the world
      with abbreviated love

            (from "Running after Doug")

Katherena Vermette lives, works, and plays in Winnipeg. Her full-length poetry manuscript, titled black and blue, is currently making the rounds, as "they" say. Another current project she wants folks to know about is her editorial work on XXX NDN, an upcoming Love 'n' Lust themed anthology by members of the Aboriginal Writers Collective, as well as some of their far-flung friends. In these days of Minus 40, don't you wish this book were out already?

Tuesday, February 3/09 7pm

Featured reader: Jim Tallosi

Jim Tallosi is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Talking Water, Talking Fire (Queenston House, 1985), and The Trapper and the Fur-faced Spirits (Queenston House, 1981). More recent is a long poem titled Stone Snake, issued by Staccato Chapbooks in 2001.

While not immune to talking about people and cities, Tallosi is mostly some sort of metaphysical naturalist of Manitoba's diverse landscapes. His focus is often on details from the Precambrian Shield-boreal forest of the east and north, the southwest's prairie mountains, river-bottom forests, and our pervasive, magical winter. His poems are gifted in compression and concision while still being lush in detail. You might consider Robert Creeley, J. Michael Yates, Lorine Niedecker, and Gary Snyder souls of affinity for him.

      the snow crystal
      and the prairie rose

      side by side

      not melting
      not withering

      live in the mind's season

(from Talking Water, Talking Fire)

That's an entire Jim Tallosi poem, citizens! Goes by the title "The Mind's Season".

Jim Tallosi has more recent work in Prairie Fire's Home Place issue and the Manitoba Writers' Guild's A/Cross Sections anthology. He's intending to parlay his recent retirement into more exploration and making more poems.

Tuesday, January 6/09 7pm

Featured reader: Charlene Diehl

Charlene Diehl is possibly best known in these parts as the brightly plumaged dynamo at the hub of the Thin Air writers festival. But she is also a hard-working poet, and the author of the full-length lamentations (Trout Lily Press, 1997) and the chapbook mm (disOrientation press, 1992). In lamentations we find 6 suites of poems in varying styles that address directly and laterally the wrenching experience of giving birth to a daughter who survives only briefly. These are poems of an almost appalling pain, heartwrack, abjection, nobility, and struggle into something resembling wisdom and reconciliation. There is jazz and starch and feverdream in the syntax of these poems.

the body saves
what can't be borne
releases messages in code
euphoria and misery skidding
into a bigger self
the accident of design

(from "the body knows")

Diehl's current projects include some pixillated poems about - I kid you not - fruit, and some nutbar texts under the title "subliming", which operate out of an ambient logic.

Tuesday, December 2/08 7pm

Featured reader: Jan Horner

Jan Horner is the author of 2 full-length books of poetry: Elizabeth Went West (Turnstone, 1998); and Recent Mistakes (Turnstone, 1988), which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.
There are twin strains afoot in Horner's work. One is the personal lyric. Of a strange sort, shot through with unruly emotions & inappropriate colours, they are of a delicately canted surrealism. The other is a more historical sort of poem. Often about the mythography of Canada, these carry an impressionism & sarcasm about them that still maintain an attic where compassion may reside. Singletons, misfits, outcasts here. Sometimes these two strains meet and warp, look out! Horner concocts stanzas in the shape of Calm that are raddled with Wildness.

This is a letter I cannot send
Passing through so many hands and mechanical claws
suggestion flakes, combustion sputters
affection lies, curdles, calculates interest
In your hands
the words might slide off the page
and fly like cinders
into your dead eye

(from "Dead letter")

Jan Horner works as a librarian at the University of Manitoba. Her and our 2009 should see the arrival of Mama Dada; or songs of the Baroness's dog, a new book of poems, also coming out through Turnstone Press.

Tuesday, November 4/08 7pm

Featured reader: Doug Melnyk

Doug Melnyk is far better known as a visual artist, but he is also a Writer of Merit. To his credit are Doctor Meist (Lives of Dogs, 1997), which is a putative novel, and Naked Croquet (Turnstone, 1987), a book of prose poems.

You can never feel confident for very long about where reality may be in a Melnyk text. Your psychiatrist will have a weakness for therapeutic triple-x video as well as hot chocolate. Television commercials can slip beyond their scripts & begin cussing you out with heat and spice. Cool-hearted satire will combine with deep emotion.

The prose poems have a chatty contrivance to them & a tendency to seem linear, but they're not. They cohere for a 'graph or stanza, but there are leaps aplenty between.

"For him it probably is just like a cup of coffee, just as satisfying and just as casual.

It was like a storm but with no rain. We sat on the bench looking across the lake at this huge beige thing coming across the lake at us.

I worked for it, she said. And all this mud was dripping down her legs from her mini-skirt."

(from Across the Lake)

In a Melnyk world, which is also Our Winnipeg, real-life surrealism is as common as a snowbank or a housefire.

Tuesday, October 7/08 7pm

Featured reader: George Amabile

George Amabile's work has appeared in numerous periodicals, journals and anthologies in Canada, the USA, the UK, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand. He has edited two poetry magazines, published eight books and won half a dozen national and international prizes. His most recent book is Tasting the Dark: New and Selected Poems (The Muses' Company 2001).

Tuesday, September 2/08 7pm

Featured reader: Clarise Foster

Clarise Foster was born in Fresno, California in 1955, and currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Clarise has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Asian Studies from the University of Hawaii, and was in the Chinese Language and Literature Graduate Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has also studied at the University of Guam, the University of British Columbia and has taken creative writing classes at the University of Manitoba and through the University of Winnipeg Continuing Education Program. She has worked for Blizzard Publishing, J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, Staccato Chapbooks and Prairie Fire magazine, and is currently the managing editor of literary magazine Contemporary Verse 2.

Tuesday, June 3/08 7:30pm Aqua Books

Featured reader: Madeline Coopsammy

What might you do upon reading a poem beginning with the couplet "It was a glorious time/ we lived a lie"?

Well, you might admire the audacity of it, and finish reading "Delhi" in a sort of molten swoon, and then feel compelled to read more of Madeline Coopsammy's verse.

Madeline Coopsammy's debut book of poems, Prairie Journey, came out in 2004 from TSAR Books. Within, one may find this East Indian Trinidadian writer tracing a meander that wound up in Winnipeg. Poignant poems dealing with emotional exile, colonialism, racism, sexism. By turns lush & stark in portraiture. Often she brings a robust sardonicism into play. To a reader it is inescapable that words have weight & gravity in Coopsammy's universe.

We are a lost generation
we island children of the fifties
who sought to make our marks
upon a foreign soil
and some of us now lie interred
on strangers' land.

(from "Happy Days")

Madeline Coopsammy is a retired teacher who is presently at work on a novel, although new poems keep manifesting as well.

Tuesday, May 6 7:30pm Aqua Books

Featured reader: Kerry Ryan

Kerry Ryan, this month's featured reader, lives and writes in a blue house in Winnipeg. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and in the anthology Exposed, published by The Muses ' Company in 2003. She is an avid sleeper and a birdwatcher by association.

Award-winning writer Chandra Mayor had this to say about Ryan and her new collection in the Winnipeg Free Press recently:

“I'm completely head-over-heels in love with Kerry Ryan's first book of poetry, The Sleeping Life.

She has the most deft and delicate touch with language, writing of love and birds and houses and Leonard Cohen and, of course, sleeping.

I've been waiting so long for her to put a book into the world, and I can't stop re-reading some of the most beautiful lines and images...

‘hold me/in the soft star/of your hand’

or

‘folding and unfolding a poem/until it is a paper crane/then a flock of snowflakes’

... delicious and spine-shivery.”

The reading starts at 7:30pm and is followed by two open-mic sets with a short break in between.

Tuesday April 15/08 7:30pm

Featured reader: Sally Ito

Sally Ito's poems never seem to need to raise their voice. They just go about their intense & sublime lyrical business, balancing on a caesura both intimate & ironic tones.

there is no colour
in darkness,
but the strain of black sound
coming from the fold
above the eye
where God unwittingly dwells.

(from "The Darkness")

Poems full of dislocations and alienations. Cross-cultural and spiritual tensions.

Sally Ito's 2 books of poetry are Frogs in the Rain Barrel (Nightwood, 1995) and A Season of Mercy (Nightwood, 1999). She is also the author of an accomplished book of short fiction, Floating Shore, which came out from Mercury in 1998.

More recent writing includes a piece in the brand-new anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (Eds. Shannon Cowan, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Cathy Stonehouse; published by McGill-Queen's University Press), & a slab of work in the impending "Home Place 2" issue of Prairie Fire.

Sally teaches English and creative writing at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.

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