Tomorrow night – Thursday May 2 – we welcome our friends at Rampike and Open Letter as we host an double-double launch party for the two most recent issues of each magazine.
@ The Black Swan, 154 Danforth – 2nd floor – [map] – RSVP on Facebook
Doors 7:30 pm - Readings from 8:00 pm
Our readers:
1st Set:
Robert Anderson is a visual artist and writer. His recent publications include House Organ and Rampike. He will be featured in a forthcoming issue of Rampike as well as in B after C.
Nick Power is a founding member of The Meet the Presses collective, and has performed with the sound poetry ensemble Alexander’s Dark Band. He has a collection of poetry coming out soon from Tekst Editions called a modest device. He has several books with him tonight from his own Gesture Press including Writing on Water, Swing Rhythms and The Steady Pull of a Curious Dog. His poems in this issue of Rampike are from the manuscript Dancing with Gravity.
Camille Martin, a Toronto poet, is the author of four collections: Looms, Sonnets, Codes of Public Sleep, andSesame Kiosk. She has read her poetry in more than thirty cities in Canada and abroad. Rob McLennan writes that “there is such an expansiveness to Martin’s Looms. The poems exist in that magical place where words, images and ideas collide, creating connections that previously had never been.” Stride Magazine callsLooms “impressive and addictive.”
Richard Truhlar is the author of nine books of fictions and poetry: Infinite Anatomies, Terminal Intelligence, The Hollow and other fictions, The Pitch, Dynamite in the Lung, Figures in Paper Time,Utensile Paradise, Parisian Novels, and A Porcelain Cup Placed There, as well as a number of chapbooks, and numerous publications in national and international anthologies and periodicals.
2nd Set:
George Elliot Clarke O.C., O.N.S., Ph.D.,is the Poet Laureate of Toronto and the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature. His celebrated books include Whylah Falls (1990), Beatrice Chancy (1998), Execution Poems (2000), and his “colouring books”: Blue (2001), Black (2006), and Red (2011). His newest book,Illicit Sonnets (2013), was just published, last week, In London, UK, in hardcover!
Concetta Principe writes prose-poems and is completing her PhD thesis. Her third book, a collection of prose-poems, walking: Not-A-Nun’s Diary has come out this spring with Montreal’s DC Books. And she is currently completing her thesis in the Humanities Department at York University exploring the recurrence of ‘messiah’ and Muselmann in twentieth-century cultural and theoretical texts.
Gregory Betts is the author of five books of poetry, including If Language, The Others Raisd in Me, and The Obvious Flap (with Gary Barwin). His poems and experiments have appeared in magazines and classrooms across North America and in a small smattering of cities in Europe. He developed the form called plunderverse in response to Toronto’s John Oswald’s plunderphonics and has been pillaging literature and life ever since. He lives in St. Catharines and might soon be from there. His next book, Boycott, is forthcoming from Make Now Press in Los Angeles.
Gary Barwin is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist. His recent books include Franzlations [the imaginary Kafka parables] (with Craig Conley & Hugh Thomas), and The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts.) To quote David McFadden, Barwin is “another breath of fresh air from Hamilton, Ontario.”
3rd Set:
Babar Khan is a Toronto poet, writer and translator who grew up in Paris. He has been published inContemporary Verse 2, Rampike, The Spice Monitor and Dada Vol-au-Vent. In 2006, he won the Prix de poésie de la Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris for a poem that he wrote in English and translated into French. In 2011, he co-organized a historic feminist/Dionysian poetry reading at the House of Lancaster, as part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change. Biscuit Galaxy, his first short collection of poems, was published in 2012 by Lyrical Myrical Press. He has finally succeeded in finding the ontological links between biscuits and the Andromeda Galaxy.
Beatriz Hausner’s most recent poetry books are: Sew Him Up (2010), Enter the Raccoon (2012), her selected poems in Spanish translation: La costurera y el muñeco viviente, 2012), and the chapbook: and De ideale man gedichten (Dutch translation by Laurens Vancrevel, 2011). She has translated many works of literature, including the poetry of César Moro, Rosamel del Valle, Mandrágora, Abigael Bohórquez, the prose of Alvaro Mutis, among others. She was one of the founding publishers of Quattro Books. She has co-edited three issues of Open Letter, of which Surrealism in Canada is forthcoming this summer.
Frank Davey has been the editor & publisher of Open Letter since 1965. In the 1970s & 80s he was an editor of Coach House Press. He has four dozen books in print including in the fields of Poetry, Literary Criticism and Theory, Cultural Criticism, Books Edited, and Memoir. His most recent books are aka bpNichol: a Preliminary Biography, from ECW Press, and the artist’s book Spectres of London Ont., from Massassauga Editions.
Karl Jirgens, has edited Rampike magazine since 1979. He co-edited the “collaborations” issue of Open Letter, which is available today. Jirgens has four books in print, with Coach House, ECW and Mercury Presses, new fiction coming out with TEKST editions and over a hundred of scholarly and creative articles published internationally. He will take over as Head of the English, Language and Creative Writing Department, at the University of Windsor, as of July of this year.
