Edmonton “A Balanced Brunch” Event:
Sunday, April 29, 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Fort Saskatchewan Public Library, 10011-102 Street, Fort Saskatchewan, AB
FREE

Celebrating the 14th Annual National Poetry Month, four talented Edmonton area poets will share their perspective on this year’s theme of “balance” – culturally, creatively, linguistically, personally, socially, playfully, politically, poetically, or perhaps even musically! Featured Artists: Diane Buchanan, Alexis Kienlen, Peter Midgley, Pierrette Requier. Open Mike at 2:30 PM. MC: Dymphny Dronyk.

This year the Festival travels to Fort Saskatchewan to spread poetic joy!

Coffee, tea and muffins will be served.

Sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.

Visit the Edmonton Poetry Festival website for more great events.

This same
complicated simplicity
I offered my men
their beaking otherwise
their sipping elsewhere
the acute sting
of betrayal
how     after
the days slipped sideways
throat wanted to clasp closed
and in my sorrow  broke
a flash.
Hummingbirds
beat their wings 820 times per minute
and a small iridescent thought
hovers
I might want love again,
to be suspended in mid-air
feel the rapid beating of that tiny tiny heart.
The weightlessness.

~ Pierrette Requier

Pierrette Requier, a bilingual Alberta writer and spoken word performer, enjoys collaborations across artistic disciplines. She serves as literary representative of RAFA, an Alberta organization supporting French artists. Her book of prose poems details from the edge of the village, (Frontenac House, Calgary, Quartet 2009) was short-listed for the Edmonton Book Prize. Her most recent publication Storm/orage from Edmonton’s The Works Festival, 2010 has appeared with Ian Sheldon’s paintings in Storm Chaser Canadian Prairie Skyscapes (August 2011). As Wind Eye Writing Seminar designer and host, Pierrette has facilitated writing workshops across Alberta for aspiring writers from 6 to 86 years old. Recently she has enjoyed participating in Edmonton’s first French LitFest’s Event “On lit à L’artère”.

Pierrette will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Read more of Pierrette Requier’s poetry:
- Sketches of a Return, February 2006
- Unravelled
- Mount Edith Cavell Suite
- The Angel of Simon
- Autumn Dawn
- You Never Know/On ne sait jamais

From Shamva to Bindura,
he walked. Every Saturday,
he danced ’til dawn.
And on the seventh day, he walked
from Bindura back to Shamva.

And in the Qatara Depression
(“Spiders as big as your hand,” he’d love to tell)
he marched and marched
and marched right through Cairo
as well.

He walked up the hill
at Monte Casino,
then stumbled back down again
carrying corpses that remain with him still.

Up the hill at Gross Barmen,
he walked, children buckling his shoulders.
And then he walked back down again.

And in the last days, his hands
walked into Ma’s hands,
held on tight until
he walked right out of life
and into our hearts.

~ Peter Midgley

Peter Midgley’s poetry has appeared in Canadian and South African journals, and his bilingual volume of poems, perhaps i should / miskien moet ek will come out with Kalamalka Press in 2010. His award-winning children’s books have been translated into 28 languages. He is also the author of two plays, Archetypes and Namlish. Peter is currently working on a translation of the Afrikaans children’s classic, Huppelkind, and a book-length creative non-fiction project, A Truce Stranger than Fiction.

Peter will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

You echo with eons of transmutations.
Once it was believed that you carry maps
of whole constellations pressed into you.
I run my finger across your pitted surface,
feel each star-sparked indentation.

A face rises from your mottled skin,
bloody, scarred and broken, one eye
swollen shut, crack of mouth,
cross-scarred cheek, one granite tear
beneath an open eye. It’s that eye
that haunts me with it’s hopeless gaze.

We share a molecular sameness, a spirit
that lies deep within your torpid cells.
Eons of wisdom crammed
into one small stone. Your unyielding
endurance a dormant promise, blessings
buried in prophetic stillness.

~ Diane Buchanan

Diane Buchanan is a poet and an essayist from Edmonton.  She has written three collections of poetry. Her second book, Between the Silences was short-listed for the Acorn-Plantos award for peoples’ poetry.  Her most recent book is Unruly Angels was published by Frontenac House and in 2011.

Diane will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Read more of Diane Buchanan’s poetry:
- October
- Revelation
- The Warp and Woof
- On a Prairie Slough Just Outside the City One Morning Mid-July
- The Secret of Grass
- A Different Kind of Loss - and Finding

i try to advance,
but you block me,
take pieces away.

i advance through empty space again,
wounded and weaker, but still focused
on that lone token,
that one piece.

you are too smart for me.

the horsemen wait in the dark,
quick to pounce on my pawns.

there is no bloodshed
on our white and black battlefield,
just advance, retreat,
the severance, the pieces taken
and the final word i speak from my dry mouth.

“check
mate”.

~ Alexis Kienlen

Alexis Kienlen is the author of two poetry collections She Dreams in Red and 13. She is also a journalist and fiction writer and currently works as a reporter for Alberta Farmer. She holds an Honours degree in International Studies from the University of Saskatchewan and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from Concordia University. Originally from Saskatoon, Alexis has lived in numerous Canadian cities and currently makes her home in Edmonton.

Alexis will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Read more of Alexis Kienlen’s poetry:
- the old indian and the coat
- portrait of the poet
- South to North Saskatchewan

Calgary “A Balanced Brunch” Event:
Sunday, April 22, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Central Library, John Dutton Theatre, 616 Macleod Trail SE
FREE

Celebrating the 14th Annual National Poetry Month, four talented Calgary area poets will share their perspective on this year’s theme of “balance” – culturally, creatively, linguistically, personally, socially, playfully, politically, poetically, or perhaps even musically! Featured artists: Vivian Hansen, Richard Harrison, Micheline Maylor, T.B. Perry. MC: Dymphny Dronyk.

Coffee, tea and muffins will be served.

Sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.

Visit the Calgary Spoken Word Festival website for more great events.

Something red covered my head and I smelled the huntsman’s sweat
and cake and wine before the darkness swallowed me.

It must have been a dream
I thought, groggy and cotton-mouthed.
The skin on my lumped belly was pulled taut and sewn
with thick, jagged stitches from breastplate to pelvis,
threatening to burst. My tongue was like sand on the wound
so I dragged my sack-of-stones body from the bed
and out the front door. My claws clicked and slipped on the blood
that seeped from my stomach, smearing a snail’s trail along the floor.

The old woman stood on the porch, hands clasped
over her cane, eyes fixed to the ground in front of her.
My thirst pulled me to the stream and I, with my belly
full of rocks, leaned out to lap up the coolness in the twilight.
A slight nudge sent me sliding down the bank
and I didn’t even try to swim when I hit the bottom.

I saw her through the water.
Such big eyes she had, that glared down through
to the darkness inside me. In her hand was a needle,
still glistening and dripping with a sap-like liquid
that matched the colour of her cap.

~ Tyler B. Perry

Tyler B. Perry works as a junior high teacher, and his first book of poetry, Lessons in Falling (2010, B House Publications), explores the world of school, drawing its inspiration from the events, personalities and physical surroundings he encounters in his daily work. Tyler is an active presence in Calgary’s poetry community, and along with a small group of poets, organizes and hosts the Ink Spot Collective monthly poetry slam. He was captain of the 2010 Calgary poetry slam team and has performed his work at venues across the city. Tyler is an MFA candidate at UBC and continues residing in Calgary with his wife and two young children. You can visit him on the web and read some of his poems at http://tbperry.com/.

Tyler will be reading at the Calgary “Balanced Brunch” event on April 22. We hope to see you at the John Murrell Theatre.

Read more of Tyler B. Perry’s poetry:
- I don’t teach subjects; I teach students.
- Degrees of Doneness
- Everything I know

You said you wasted too much of your time
when we were young partying with me.
A few months after that
you came to my other friend’s funeral and heard the elegy
and said you hoped you could be a friend like that to me again.
I don’t know which of your eyes to believe.
I would call but you would tell me
you are too busy to talk
like you have been for years
and your kids need something, just now.
Kids I’ve never met, though I am sure they’re in elementary school.
And you have to go and you have book club tonight
with your very good friend who you like to drink wine with.
She lives so close
and she’s so great.
I am sure that’s true.
I know what it’s like
to look in your eyes when you laugh.

Then I remember what you said
about wasting all that time,
and I want you to know,
I just don’t feel that way
at all.

~ Micheline Maylor

Micheline Maylor recent publication “Starfish”, a chapbook with Rubicon Press, sold out in 2011. She became a recent graduate of the May Studio at the Banff Centre in 2010. She was named honourable mention in the UK’s 2007 Petra Kenny poetry awards. She has upcoming fiction and poetry in The Shyness Anthology, and Stampede Noir Anthology. Her latest works can be found in the Freshwater Pearls Anthology, Literary Mama, Numero Cinq, and the Literary Review of Canada. She attained a BA with honours at the University of Calgary in English, a Masters degree with distinction in creative writing at Lancaster in Northern England, and a Ph.D. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Literature. She has been the recipient of the Overseas Research Scholarship, the International Research Scholarship and Alberta Foundation for the Art grants. She has poetry published in over 50 journals in 5 countries. A certified poetry fanatic, she teaches creative writing, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and composition at Mount Royal University. She also teaches various poetry workshops at the Alexandra Writer’s Centre Society, serves as its past President, and is the editor of FreeFall literary magazine. Her first book is titled Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems (2007) and is available through Wolsak & Wynn.