Poet Garth Martens (Who Else in the Dark Headed There) will be at WORD Vancouver festival for the panel “The Art of Transformation.” Garth will be joined in conversation by Eve Joseph and Billeh Nickerson, moderated by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, as they each travel through very different landscapes: a mother’s disappearance, the haunted rooms of childhood, and a hospital stay that prompts reflections on mortality, luck, and survival. Through inventive and deeply attentive uses of language, each writer transforms lived experience into something unexpected, illuminating how memory reshapes the past, how imagination unsettles the ordinary, and how poetry can help us navigate uncertainty and change. Through loss, humour, wonder, and resilience, these poets reveal what endures and what becomes possible in the aftermath of transformation.
The event will take place on Saturday, September 19 at 11AM, at the Poetry Tent in UBC Robson Square.
More details here.
Get Who Else in the Dark Headed There here!
ABOUT WHO ELSE IN THE DARK HEADED THERE
In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour.
A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.
Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.
Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is also a member of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives in Victoria, BC.
