Book Launch - a friendly reminder

Congratulations to Adrienne Gruber

Poet Adrienne Gruber is the winner of the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award for her chapbook Mimic, published by Leaf Press of Lantzville, B.C.

Lipstick Press was honoured to have Robert Martens' Poltergeist among the short-listed, including:

• Spencer Gordon, Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast!, Ferno House (Toronto)
• Liz Howard, (skullambient), Ferno House (Toronto)
• Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin, let lie, above/ground press (Ottawa)
• Hugh Thomas, Opening the Dictionary, above/ground press (Ottawa)

Wishing Keith Wilkinson, author of Winter Gifts, a happy birthday

Keith, now retired from his paid professional work, reflects back on his life:


What's unrealized—
is it potential
or was it a dream?

Lipstick hopes the dream never dies, and that it realizes its potential in the world of new poetry.

Impermanence book launch December 7th on Gabriola

You are invited to a 
Book launch: 

Impermanence 

poems by Janet Vickers

published by Ekstasis Editions, 2012 

December 7, 7pm

at the Rollo Centre,  685 North Road, Gabriola Island 

In Impermanence, Janet Vickers explores the roots of a profound energy driving the universe: why things change, grow old, die, and then life seems to flourish again. Heraclitus said that you cannot set foot in the same river twice. The river, like the passage of time, is in constant flux and change, never stopping, always flowing. Nothing remains the same, nothing remains still, all passes away in the flow of time and all is impermanent in a constant state of transformation. Life itself seems fleeting and transient, as each moment sifts through our hands like sand on an endless beach. It is the impermanence of existence that transforms all that is and all that will ever be: without death there is no birth, without the seed there is no flower. Those being born are already dying, as Bob Dylan said. Seed becomes the flower, the cradle becomes the grave and all is charged with the electricity of temporality, all is changed from moment to moment. In her first book of poems, Impermanence, Janet Vickers has captured these ephemeral moments in tranquility and grace, driven by a succinct and powerful spark that ignites all existence.

"Where are the measures of impermanence?" asks Janet Vickers in this extraordinary volume of poetry. In Vickers' world, even the self is a bubble that must constantly be renamed. Her poetry, however, measures impermanence against abiding things: the joys of nature, the struggle against power external and internal, unconditional love. A potent and magical book that swings deftly between tears and laughter. Robert Martens 

Cover art: Mindy Joseph. “Aquagain” 2008, 24" x 18", oil and encaustic on wood. Mindy lives on Gabriola Island, BC. www.mindyjoseph.com

Books available for purchase

Refreshments

RSVP if you can: 250-247-2077
welcome if you can't 

Pause - Response Tanka by Naomi Beth Wakan and David Bateman

Two very distinct voices, Naomi Beth Wakan and David Bateman have created a beautiful new blog of response tanka. Not only is it finely crafted, it is free.  You can find it here . . . Pause

the honesty, my token

flower – profuse in seeding.

I too aim

for its transparency so that

you can see right through me

                                                          Naomi

seeing in the dark

all the lightness we have shared

ink woman, diva

we unite in othered woods

infirm against firm earth 

                                                         David    

Says David "When I approach haiku, and response tanka, I approach them through a phrase from a Wallace Steven’s poem - “uttered word by word.” These forms graciously offer me the opportunity to deposit my emotions into a very measured, and for me, liberating form. Writing response tanka can be an act of reclamation and self-preservation. The literal translation of kokoro, a healthy heart, contributes literally and figuratively to my personal sense of an idea of order in the midst of a chaotic world."

Naomi asks "What on earth could a rather domesticated, unsophisticated woman living on a small, very rural island have in common with a transvestite, city-smart man twenty-five years younger?  How could they have enough in common to cause them to write back and forth for several months sharing their momentary thoughts in the form of tanka?  Even here the gap between them is large, as he sticks, for the most part, to the 5,7,5,7,7, syllable count of traditional Japanese tanka form, while she adopts the short, long, short, long, long lengths of line that many non-Japanese tanka writers have adopted."

You'll find the answer to Naomi's question if you read some of them.