Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds

Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds gathers the voices of poets from across Canada, the US and the UK who write of water.  Bottled, clouded, held in rain, in river, estuary and lake, sweet water is the planet’s life force and the poets here examine it from every angle – the pitcher plant, the beaver and the American Bull Frog, rain, clouds, smog, the many ducks and the salmon and the last lake sturgeon. Poets take us to the rivers they live along – and grieve daily – the Peace River Canyon, Chilcotin, Taylor River, the Humber River, Millstone River, and the Fraser River.

Edited by Yvonne Blomer, contributors include Kate Braid, Gary Barwin, Katherena Vermette, Arleen Paré, John Pass, Ariel Gordon, Brian Brett, Rita Wong, Fred Wah, Trevor Carolan, John Terpstra, Russell Thornton, Zoë Landale, Christine Lowther, Elena Johnson, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Daniela Elza, Rhonda Ganz, Geoffrey Nilson, Pamela Porter, Barbara Pelman, Kelly Shepherd, Rob Taylor, Zachariah Wells, Bren Simmers, and more.

Published by Caitlin Press 
March 2020

in my ear continuously like a stream

These are poems of deconstructed literary canon, repurposing sampled text from canonical works of literature to discuss and critique canon its perpetually restrictive formations. Composed by collage, the text samples Voltaire, Orwell, Frye, Chaucer, Conrad, and many more in an effort to both destroy and highlight their literary influence on the writer and the culture as a whole. 

​Published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November 2017

O

O is an oval. O is an expanding circle. O is a poem about space: the internal, external and literal expressions of space, not limited, bleeding into each other. From our solar cradle to the oldest reaches of space-time. All spaces feeding back on themselves. Into language. Formed from the galaxy of stuff, all to this and back out again. A response to the exhibition: space_ at the New Westminster New Media Gallery, Summer 2016.

Published in 2017 by Swimmers Group. 

We Have to Watch 

Picture
​A series of responses to the conceptual photographs of American artist Gregory Crewdson, the ekphrastic poems in We Have to Watch document the tension inherent in modern spaces and engage with fractures in urban and suburban environments. We Have to Watch acts as a vocalization of Crewdson’s artwork, with multiple speakers investigating the psychological and physical bonds between people and place. 

Published in 2016 by The Quilliad Press 

headache summer

​Influenced by the visual poetry of bpNichol and the stop-motion animation of Norman McLaren, headache summer explores Kierkegaard's notion of the self as the mediating activity residing between opposites.

Exhibited for Visible Verse 2015 at The Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada.