Off the Shelf Poetry Reading Series: Garth Martens
Garth Martens, author of Who Else in the Dark Headed There: Poems, will be a featured poet for the Off the Shelf Poetry Reading Series! Presented by Simon Fraser University, the reading will take place on Friday, March 27.
Time and more details to come.
Order a copy of 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.
