Beautiful Women Contributors

Here are the contributors' poems.  The plan is to publish in the spring.

"Unwinding" Angeline Schellenberg
"Malvena Salutes in a Howling Wind" Debbie Okun Hill
"All the best" D K Knowles
"My Mother's Wisdom" Franci Louann
"Outlier" Heather Brager
"Beautiful" Honey Novick
"Directions for the Daughter I May Never Have" Joy Donnell
"Indelible" Kate Marshall Flaherty
"Where Beauty Begins" Katherine L. Gordon
"Whether You Like It" Kim Clark
"Hide Lotus Under Leaf" Kim Goldberg
"One of Them" L Muirhead
"Funeral Home" Louise M. Carson
"Beauty is Skin Deep" Naomi Beth Wakan
"Placenta Encapsulation" Paula Lietz
"Revelation IV: The Art of the Garden" Ronnie R. Brown
"Jackie Ciano the Right Whale Hero" Shelley Haggard
"Dream of Another World" Vikash Kumar
"Revelations" Vuong Pham
"Feist" Waldemar Ens


The image on this blog is not necessarily the image for the book's cover - that is yet to be decided.

Thank you all for your beautiful poems.

Beautiful Women

Thanks to all who have submitted beautiful poems to this project.  I plan to read through them all in the next week and will reply to all, whether selected or not, as soon as a decision has been made.

____________________________________





Lipstick Press is planning on publishing a chapbook anthology (which means 20 poems) about beautiful women, beauty that is true and natural. To challenge the oppressive images of beauty that teaches young girls, through clever advertising and propaganda, to strive for a false ideal. To challenge the idea a woman's worth depends upon a man's opinion.

Apart from the trillion dollar industry designed to instill insecurity in consumers, urging them to strive for a certain look, it sends young, vulnerable girls and boys into destructive, soul-destroying activities in search of a vague success.

Children are the canaries in our hyper-capitalist world. While a woman has more options than a hundred years ago, media influence has placed her on the slut continuum - popular and desirable at one end, or invisible and cold at the other; and the level of bullying in schools illuminates the confusion, self-doubt and fear our youth are trying so hard to overcome.

So why a book of poems on beauty? To reclaim the original meaning of beauty. What is beautiful to the poet? Who are the beautiful women around you? What is it that makes them beautiful? Is it grace, confidence, kindness - or is it something that cannot be objectified? Yes, men are beautiful too but that is a topic for another occasion.

Please send three short, previously unpublished poems to Lipstick Press - lipstickpress@shaw.ca
with "Beautiful Women Anthology" in the subject line.

Deadline February 14, 2013. 

All submissions will receive a response.  

Freedom to Read Week February 24 - March 2

We cannot take anything we have for granted including the freedom to read. Canada is a free country by world standards yet books and magazines are banned at the border. Libraries and schools are regularly asked to remove books.

Who asks for books to be banned?  Those who get organized, who are offended by some materials. But are they the books you would like to see banned?

I know there are some things I would like to see banned but they are not books. This is where freedom of information and conversation helps us become informed citizens engaged in creating a better world. 

You can order your kits here. 

Jack Layton: Art in Action, edited by Penn Kemp

Looking for a chance to win a prize?

Malahat 2013 Long Poem Prize!

Deadline: February 1, 2013 (postmarked)
Prize: two $1000 CAD prizes will be awarded
Entry fee:
$35 CAD for Canadian entries
$40 USD for entries from the USA
$45 USD for entries from elsewhere
(entry fee includes a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review)

Enter one long poem or a cycle of poems between 10 and 20 published pages (one published page = 32 lines or less).

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.

                                                        

                                                                                                     

Robert Martens' Poltergeist shortlisted for 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award

cover painting: Chiu Ming Chiang

Lipstick Press is proud to congratulate Robert Martens on being shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  

Meet the Presses collective took over the administration of this annual award, originally launched in 1996.  Named for the late poet bpNichol, the prize is awarded to the author of the best poetry chapbook published in the previous year.

The finalists are chosen by contest judges, Bill Kennedy and Maggie Helwig, and the winner will be announced at the Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market, on November 17, 2012, noon to 4:30 p.m., at the Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Street, in Toronto.


The finalists for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award are:
Spencer Gordon, Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast!, Ferno House (Toronto)
Adrienne Gruber, Mimic, Leaf Press (Lantzville, B.C.)
Liz Howard, (skullambient), Ferno House (Toronto)
Robert Martens, Poltergeist, Lipstick Press (Gabriola, B.C.)
Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin, let lie, above/ground press (Ottawa)
Hugh Thomas, Opening the Dictionary, above/ground press (Ottawa)