Small, but mighty
We are so pleased (okay, tickled pink) that our good friends at Coach House Books selected knife | fork | book to host poet LISA ROBERTSON for her March 2017 Tour stop in Toronto. We wish we could accommodate all who plan to attend Monday night, and we do have a capacity. Here’s how it will work.
Monday evening (the 20th), Rick’s Cafe will be closed and cleared out at 6PM. A line-up will form outside our storefront, 281 Augusta Avenue. At 6:15, the first 30 people in line will receive a single free ticket each for entry into the reading (mostly standing room only). Weather permitting, we’ll open the storefront window, for those outside to hear the reading.
Afterwards, there will be a book signing, so those waiting in line will be able to purchase and/or have their books signed by Lisa.
Once again, we join Coach House Books in welcoming LISA ROBERTSON, MARCH 20th at knife | fork | book. Doors 6:30 Poetry 7-ish
UP NEXT at KFB: March 20th LISA ROBERTSON. March 23rd STUART ROSS | STEVE MEAGHER. March 26th ERIN MOURE CHUS PATO Secession / Insecession TORONTO BOOK LAUNCH (NOTE: Sunday 3-5PM). March 30th JULIE CAMERON GRAY | NYLA MATUK. March 31st METATRON SHOWCASE. APRIL 1ST VALLUM CHAPBOOK SHOWCASE. April 6th MIKE LALA | ELIANNA LEV | ERIC SCHMALTZ. April 11th MOLLY PEACOCK | PATRICIA YOUNG | NOAH WARENESS. April 13th THE INCONVENIENTS. April 20th WORDS (ON) PAGES. April 21st ULRIKKA GERNES | CASSIDY McFADZEAN. April 27th CAConrad | Jeff KIRBY. April 28th & 29th | CAConrad Workshops: New Moon (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals
Photos: KIRBY
Get some
“In Jim Nason‘s fifth collection of poetry, Touch Anywhere to Begin (Signature Editions, 2016), poems are set in a physical world where full-throttle desire commingles with love, loss and grief. Although death is ever present — death of a father, death of a friend — there is a life-affirming/mystical quality at the core of the book. Nason reminds us that the city is both real and surreal, a place of creatures and buildings, imagination and deep emotions.”
JIM NASON
DECEMBER 15TH
knife | fork | book @ Rick’s Cafe | 281 Augusta Avenue | Kensington Market
Doors open 6:30PM | Poetry 7-ish
Jim Nason is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently, Music Garden. He has also published two novels, The Housekeeping Journals and I Thought I Would Be Happy, as well as a collection of short fiction, The Girl on the Escalator. His award-winning poems, essays and stories have been published in literary journals across the United States and Canada, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, 2010, and 2014. He has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Award in both fiction and poetry categories. Jim was born in Montreal and has lived in Calgary, Vancouver, and Syracuse. He has degrees from York, Ryerson, and McGill Universities and presently lives in Toronto where he writes and teaches. He is the owner and publisher of Tightrope Books.
Rosily
Rosily I squander
myself*
LISA ROBERTSON
3 SUMMERS
Our current bestseller from Coach House Books
Find it here. knife | fork | book
*(Is there any other way?)
“presences”
“What is left out of these images is the idea of contact, and contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish. Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.
I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.”
Louise Glück from Proofs and Theories
Rothko said a similar thing about his work, that they weren’t ‘paintings,’ but ‘presences.’
(Thanks James.)
“Anew and over again.”
“I prefer to not memorize my texts. Instead, I like my poems to be improvisatory like how I often cut every line and stanza of my poems and rearrange them in a different order. It still remains a wonderful poem to me.”
STANFORD CHEUNG’s reading copy of Any Seam or Needlework (The Operating System, 2016) last night at knife | fork | book
Photos: KIRBY
“A poet is plunderphonics.”
A poet is plunderphonics. Living in the surreal but grasping the environment by the neck to what exists. Then it’s translated to words and redefined universally. A poet is not just a stagnant identity itself, nor is it a made identity. Anyone can be a poet as long as one holds firm to expressing themselves. I feel there is no label.
Just as it is impossible to perform tasks such as making a shirt without a seam as stated in the ballad, the process of bringing the poet’s thoughts in unison with the poem can be, if not, just as impossible as the tasks stated in “Scarborough Fair”. My playing with the consciousness of the poem is the key feature of this collection. It often starts out with a rant of mine and like a seed sown beneath the soil, it will continue to grow and as it grows, I begin to manipulate the formation of words, the rhythm and musicality of the idea in which the play on of living words brings my naked poem into life. It’s almost like the phenomena of playing with fire.
