Thursday, April 20th, 2023
7:00pm at Shelf Life Books, 1302 4th Street SW
Join us for the 192nd instalment of Single Onion, featuring four great poets for National Poetry Month: Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Moni Brar, Ian Fitzgerald, and Irene Naested.
Free. No registration required. All are welcome.
Featured Readers:
Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois/Acadian poet and translator. His first book, Correspondent, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. He lives in Vancouver, where he writes and teaches in both English and French. His latest collection, Entre Rive and Shore, is a transliterative reimagining of one of Dominique’s ancestors escape from a British prison ahead of the Acadian expulsion. Blending English and French, Dominique’s work evokes the Acadian “Chiac” language. Entre Rive and Shore is an exhilarating collection that reassesses what it means to live between two identities, two worlds, and two languages.
Moni Brar was born in rural India and raised in northern British Columbia on the land of the Tse’Khene peoples. Hailing from a long lineage of subsistence farmers, she spends much of her time contemplating land, loss, language, and longing. Her creative work aims to open space to invoke belonging, as well as class, gender, and racial equity. She has multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and was the recipient of the 2022 Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal and the 2022 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. A finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, she has received writing awards from PRISM, Grain, Room, The Fiddlehead, and The Ex-Puritan. Her work appears in Best Canadian Poetry, The Literary Review of Canada, Hobart, the League of Canadian Poets’ “Poem in Your Pocket” postcard series. She believes art contains the possibility of healing.
Ian Fitzgerald’s professional background in advertising led to teaching at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Alberta. He has trifled with poetry since teenage and is getting dangerously close to thinking he should take it seriously, maybe. He is quite keen on poetry and hopes one day that will be requited. His poem “Decibels” was published in We Are One – Poems from the Pandemic, 2020; “Sounding” in Subterrranean Blue Poetry Volume X, Issue IV, 202; “Through a Certain Mirror,” Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits (Wet Ink Books 2022); “Ear Drums,” FreeFall Magazine, Fall 2022; as well as two ‘slogan poems’ accepted for publication in Journal of Customer Behaviour, Westburn Publishing, U.K. in 2022/2023.
Dr. Irene Naested was awarded institutional and national teaching and research recognition, achieved Full Professor and Professor Emerita (2015) from Mount Royal University. Irene has published and exhibited her visual art and writing, locally, nationally and internationally. Her most recent books of her poetry, prose and visual art are Light as it Falls (2020) and Art-Making: A Companion in Solitude (2021). Upon leaving academia and her “re-careering,” Poetic Inquiry was becoming a recognized method of documenting research in the Humanities. Irene is developing a collection of her work on Narrative Inquiry through Word and Image. Check out her website: www.irenenaested.com or www.passporttothearts.ca