SINGLE ONION #142
WHAT: The Single Onion wraps up its season with readings from Catherine Owen, Beth Everest, and Richard Harrison.
WHEN: Thursday, June 15th, at 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Shelf Life Books, 100 – 1302 4th St. SW (shelflifebooks.ca)
About the poets:
Catherine Owen is the author of ten collections of poetry and three of prose. Her work has been nominated for awards, and she’s toured Canada eight times and appeared in anthologies, as well as translations. Catherine has been employed by both the Locations and the Props department in TV land, plays metal bass and has two cats: Solstice and Equinox. Her latest collection is an extended love letter to her poetic influences and to the real-world objects, people, places and situations that fascinate her. Inspired by the work of John Ashbery, among others, in Dear Ghost, Owen returns to the kooky imagery and humorous style she last visited with her award-winning collection Frenzy. These poems entertain immensities of sound while plumbing the depths of the psyche’s surrealities, content to enter a dreamlike realm where meaning is found in the nonsensical, the utterly human, and the everyday.
Beth Everest is a Calgary based writer whose poetry and fiction have been published in journals across the country. She has won numerous awards for her work and her teaching. Most recently, her piece “this poem is about desire” was awarded the silver medal at the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Awards (2014), and “hanging clothes” won second place in the 2013 Freefall Fiction Contest. Currently, Beth is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Languages and Cultures at Mount Royal University, where she teaches Creative Writing. Her latest collection of poems, silent sister: the mastectomy poems (Frontenac House) explores a narrative of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, and bears witness to social and psychological impacts, for better or worse, of the altered body and mind.
Richard Harrison is a nationally recognized poet, editor and essayist on topics ranging from philosophy to prayer, literary criticism to mathematics, and poetry to hockey. A professor at Mount Royal University, he teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in comics and the graphic novel. The great Alberta flood of 2013 slides through Richard Harrison’s latest collection, On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood (Wolsak & Wynn). On these waters float Harrison’s mourning for his father, who suffered a form of dementia later in life but never forgot the poems he’d memorized as a young man. Alongside these, the waters also carry Harrison’s love of comic books, his struggles with haiku and his willingness to stay in the game, to “try again.” Combining elements of memoir, elegy, lyrical essay and personal correspondence, Richard’s latest collection is a generous and enchanting book, one that leaves you, like the poet, thinking about the way “characters in a novel can escape anything / except their story.”
Single Onion usually happens the third Thursday of the month, ten times a year. Our event schedule can always be found at: http://www.singleonion.com.
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We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, The League of Canadian Poets and the Calgary Arts Development
