The Jane Day Reader: West Meets East

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

West Meets East

Hey all,

If our SK/AB tour in the spring wasn't enough, Regina's Tracy Hamon and I will be traveling to Ottawa & Toronto in early October...and reading with a brace of poets in each town.

I know I've got barely one and a half readers of this blog in Ottawa and Toronto put together but I thought I'd make note of it here...

Many thanks to Ibi Kaslik for her help in arranging the Toronto reading; ditto Sandra Ridley for e-whispering Pearl Pirie's name in my ear.

Thanks too to the League of Canadian Poets, Palimpsest Press and Coteau Books, who have enabled our swanning about the country, books in hand.

Do come! It'll be great fun!

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West Meets East I
Featuring Ariel Gordon, Tracy Hamon, Christine McNair & Pearl Pirie

When: October 5, 7:30 pm
Where: Collected Works Bookstore (1242 Wellington St. W., Ottawa)
Cost: Free!

Christine McNair's work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, CV2, the Bywords Quarterly Journal, Descant and a few other places. Her poems were featured in Dalhousie Blues, a collaborative project with Sean Moreland, Jamie Bradley and Caleb JW Brasset (ex-hubris press, 2009). Her work was also included in the Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House, 2010) and Rogue Stimulus (Mansfield Press, 2010) anthologies. She is one of the hosts of CKCU's Literary Landscapes program and works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie’s been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010), her first trade poetry collection, follows years of a small voice gaining in strength, and in volume, through so much subtle activity and quiet disconnect that by the time she was noticed, she was already everywhere, and already a confident voice. Her chapbooks include over my dead corpus (AngelHouse, 2010) and boathouse (above/ground, 2008). She blogs at pesbo, Humanyms, and a few other places. Poems have appeared thru dandelion, ditch, PRECIPICe, Dusie, 17 Seconds, 1cent, and Ottawater.

* * *

West Meets East II
Featuring Ariel Gordon, Tracy Hamon, Melanie Janisse & Damian Rogers

When: October 7, 7:30 pm
Where: Holy Oak Cafe (1241 Bloor St. W., Toronto)
Cost: Free!

Damian Rogers was born and raised in suburban Detroit. She has published poems in various North American magazines, including Brick, The Walrus, Matrix, Maisonneuve, and MoonLit. Her first collection, Paper Radio, came out with ECW Press in October 2009 and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Rogers lives in Toronto.

Melanie Janisse is a native of Windsor, Ontario. She holds degrees Communications from Concordia University and Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Now a resident of Toronto, Melanie keeps active as a visual artist, poet, designer and shop owner. Orioles in the Oranges (Guernica Editions, 2009) is her first collection of poetry.

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Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)