Please Join The Mercury Press and McNally-Robinson Booksellers as we celebrate the publication of:

SHIFT & SWITCH: NEW CANADIAN POETRY
edited by derek beaulieu, Jason Christie and Angela Rawlings
(The Mercury Press, 2005)

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TUESDAY DECEMBER 6th 7pm
McNally-Robinson Booksellers
120 8th Ave SW
Calgary, AB

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Featuring readings by:
derek beaulieu,
Jason Christie,
ryan fitzpatrick,
Jay Gamble,
Jill Hartman,
Larissa Lai,
Julia Williams

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about SHIFT & SWITCH:

Over 2 years in the making and featuring 41 avant-garde poets from across Canada in almost 200 pages, SHIFT & SWITCH challenges the reading and writing status quo, and questions what a poem may be.

While contemporary poetry anthologies may emphasize traditional lyric poetry, SHIFT & SWITCH offers a unique alternative: radicality, experimentation and innovation with sound, visual elements, mathematics, surrealism and ‘pataphysics.

Crack open the spine to this highly anticipated collection, and discover Canada’s next generation of innovative poets and their work!

here’s the view as of 9:30 this morning, outside my front window. liberal government toppled in a no confidence vote two days ago. i’m back home in the land of snow and bureaucracy. in a state of great despair over how i’m going to get the move to vancouver into gear, and this apartment in shape for sandy to move in. i did a bit of one-hoof yoga this morning, which helped. if i could only have my full practice back… i owe all kinds of paper to all kinds of people. i’m in no mood to do it. too bad so sad. must get to work.

Some sisters at last! Yukiko Chino is a really interesting writer and journalist who has just published a book on the history of Barbie. She has lived in Beijing for a number of years and writes about cultural misunderstandings between Japan and China– an issue that’s getting hotter and hotter as China’s economic fortune rises. She introduced me to Favianna Rodriguez, a San Francisco-based Latina activist involved in all kinds of cool stuff, including the WTO protests. To the right is their friend Ziggy and her sister Chisako, who joined us after supper and took us out for a taste of Tokyo nightlife.

in the early 90s, sister vision press published a landmark lesbian of colour anthology called piece of my heart. this week, this t-shirt was a particularly devastating encounter. the photo is small, so it’s hard to make them out, but there are us army appliques all over the front.

sexy clothes in harajuku

Roy Miki; Shigeki Takeo, who specializes in Asian Aboriginal issues at Meiji-Gakuin; and lovely Yoshi, whose last name I didn’t catch, who reads all the 17th century stuff my parents love– Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes and all that, and who kindly and attentively wheeled me around the city in a wheelchair the university provided for the evening. We’re drinking beer and eating roasted almonds under a heat lamp at a bar called La Boheme. Asia loves a dream of Europe.

Ayako Sato, who hosted us at Meiji-Gakuin University last Friday; Brent Edwards a smart young professor from Columbia, who gave a very interesting paper on the future of the term “diaspora”, and a Langston Hughes poem “Letter from Spain,” in which the speaker encounters a dying Moorish soldier who was fighting for Franco’s army; and Chieko Mulhern, a professor emeritus who taught in the US for 17 years and now lives in Tokyo. This photo was taken in a one-room restaurant that specializes in soba (buckwheat). The husband and wife who run it live upstairs. It is part of movement in Japanese cooking that jazzes up traditionally “low status” dishes. The food was amazing– smoked duck, buckwheat sprout salad, grilled miso with chopped walnuts, thick omelet, tempura, cold soba noodles, and some very potent buckwheat shochu. One-hoofing up the steep narrow stairs was hard work, but worth it.

congratulations to derek beaulieu and gary baldwin on the launch of frogments from the frag pool on saturday. sorry i missed the party.

big kudos to angela rawlings, jason christie, derek beaulieu and contributors on the vancouver launch of switch and shift, a new collection of contemporary canadian poetry. you guys rock!

pachinko lady. we all need to feel lucky sometimes.

okonomiyake boy in the basement of a department store in nagoya. i was so happy just to be able to sit down…