You laugh, but I went to a party like that once.
Heather Haley is one of BC’s poetical treasures. Here’s the info about her new book Three Blocks West of Wonderland
Three Blocks West of Wonderland
You can also download the Three Blocks West of Wonderland MP3
Haley’s poetry shakes and stirs, knocks and shocks
Heather Susan Haley, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, Ekstasis Editions
Vancouver, BC, Dec. 7, 2009 —Trailblazing poet, author, musician and media artist Heather Susan Haley’s new book, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, has hit the streets just in time for the holidays.
“Fierce, racy, full of stiletto irony, verve — yet rife with sensitivity. Three Blocks West of Wonderland is a highly fuelled poetic ride. Her LA, southern B.C. coast, energy-haunted world draws you electrically in and does not let you go. Like the subject of one of the elegies in this collection, Haley stirs, provokes the atmosphere.” – Author Russell Thornton,The Human Shore, House Built of Rain, Harbour Publishing.
Haley has been actively involved in her art for over a decade and has gained renown as an engaging performer and media artist; she is the author of a previous collection, Sideways (Anvil Press), Haley’s poetry has been selected for inclusion in numerous prestigious journals and anthologies including last year’s Verse Map of Vancouver.
Haley has been an editor for LA Weekly and publisher of Rattler and the Edgewise Café, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. Founder of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, her works have been official selections at dozens of international film festivals and she has shared her poetry and music with audiences around the world. Most recently she toured eastern Canada and the U.S. in support of her critically acclaimed AURAL Heather CD of spoken word songs, Princess Nut.
Much of Three Blocks West of Wonderland was written during her stint as artist in residence at the Banff Arts Centre and features place and travel poems alluding to post 9/11 angst and guilt here in our ‘safe’ zone.
Poet Laureate George McWhirter: “If you are a Rambling girl who wants to shirk and shake her motherland, read this jitters and jive guide to the other side of Canada and the world. Fads and fears take Air Canada wing (or Westjet’s). Sights seen turn into fables and metaphors, quirks of speech and character galore. As to the body of the language, the Canadian straightjacket lies like an old pair of stays on the stage in this diction stripper’s act. But there is a serious restlessness to Heather Haley’s serial observations — in the tradition of that great Canadian traveller in poetry, Ralph Gustafson’s: adagio notations, like his, on everything she sees and feels and musically reveals.”
Author Allan Briesmaster: “Rambunctious, relentlessly witty, visceral and vital, these poems move like a tilt-a-whirl and rollercoaster combined. Haley’s gallery of warts-and-all character studies and her portfolio of no-holds-barred travelogues bustle and bristle with forceful gestures, jolting details, and electric perceptions. Through them all, an indomitable spirit emerges: one that has taken its share of knocks and shocks and boldly prevails.”
# # #
For an interview with Heather Haley, please contact:
Heather Susan Haley
604-947-9386 • hshaley@emspace.com
http://www.heatherhaley.comOrder directly from the publisher at http://www.ekstasiseditions.com
There’s only one way to enter, and that’s to get your butt (and your rt-ing fingers) on Twitter and retweet this, from the author:
The prize is a treasure trove of books from Legend Press. Gary is, by the way, right here at WordPress: GaryMurning.com and on his site you can download and read a PDF sample chapter of If I Never, which you can buy (and thus qualify for the contest) by following this link.
congrats to the new author
Which I got via WritingIsLife on Twitter. That’s the pen up there, taking all the credit. You know the actual author is lying on the bed, zonked on painkillers and getting an IV put in.
(from Twitter, obviously, via the very handy Tweetshots utility)
NOV27, 7-10pm LANGLEY ARTS TALKS: Pamela Masik, artist of the painting series The Forgotten: Vancouver’s missing women. Talks beside Fort Pub, Glover Rd $7 OR$5/members
From her website, more information on the project:
THE FORGOTTEN is a large-scale, powerful series of portraits of women’s faces. Sixty-nine portraits, to be precise – the number of women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside who have been missing for more than a decade. The majority of them have now been identified, yet the public’s knowledge of them has, for the most part, consisted of small police photos aligned in a grid on a poster, showing most of them as blurred and haggard representations at their worst.
At one time these women had multiple faces and roles in the community. They left thousands of memories and historical details. They were mothers, friends, wives or daughters. They had run from abusive relationships, they were drug addicts, mentally challenged, or had families to support and little means to do it other than prostitution. Many were First Nations people. At this point, 26 of the missing women have been identified as slain by Port Coquitlam farmer Robert Pickton.
And here is my own post about my run-in with Pickton. My book, by the way, is called Terminal City: Vancouver’s Missing Women, so I already feel we’re on the same page. I highly recommend checking out the video on her website.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png)
The Shebeen Club 