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A promotional piece I wrote for the Literary Press Group's "All Lit Up" blog has just been posted. Not something I usually do: a)a promo article and b)write about prose fiction. But these are four really enjoyable collections of not-quite-usual stories, so I was glad to have the chance to shed a bit of virtual ink on them.

Bard Battles

In my near-total neglect of this blog--and in my war-on-many-fronts busyness--I failed to mention that I was reading last night at the annual Poetry Now Battle of the Bards at Harbourfront in Toronto. Well, I was. And it went well. A very solid set of readers. I did not win--that honour went to Talya Rubin, and well deserved--but I was among five readers (including Kate Hargreaves, who has designed my last two books, Liz Worth and Deanna Young) chosen to appear at the International Festival of Authors in the fall. I did this back in 2011, and it's quite the event, so I'm pleased and honoured to have been selected again.

Last night was also my first opportunity to hold a copy of the new book, thanks to Kate picking up a few, still warm from the press at Coach House. It's pretty damn beautiful and I feel very fortunate.

Susan G. Cole, who hosted last night's show, did a nice little write-up on it today. I chose to go with a single longer poem and read my dramatic monologue "Achromatope," which is based on Oliver Sacks's story "The Colourblind Painter." If there was "moving melancholy" in my reading, it's probably in part because I was thinking all day about Sacks's recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Though I once received correspondence from Dr. Sacks after I sent him a broadside print of "Achromatope," I can't claim to know the man, so I didn't feel comfortable dedicating the reading to him, but in retrospect that was dumb. So when I read it again at Harbourfront, I will dedicate it to him.

HOW IT CAME ON

Not consistent, but in
clusters, in lacustrine


conglomerations, in lack
lustre congress, in lacunar


conundrums, drums
con sordino, in schools


of sardine shoaling
in shallows, in shadows


and splotches of sickled
shivelight, in shimmers


and speckles, in specks,
freckles and moles, in tunnels


and tubes, in tubs and tubas
and turbines, in turbot's


turbercles, in tubercular
fits, in fletches, flitches


and flits, in flatlands
and mesas, in ditches,


in dikes, in tidal insistence,
in bridles and britches,


in fasces and faces, in flashes
and flexes and fluxion, in fluent


dysrhythmia, flaring
and falling, setting fire


to synapses and scuttling
sense to its apsis.