Garth Martens

Ali! 🫶

Thank you, Ali.

I’ll read from it this spring and summer:
• March 27 — Vancouver (SFU Library)
• April 10 — Victoria (with Planet Earth Poetry & The Malahat Review)
• April 14 — Kelowna (launch)
• April 30 — Victoria (launch)
• August 16/17 — Cumberland (with Cascadia Poetry Festival)

More details soon.

Who Else in the Dark Headed There - Biblioasis 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...

You'll find it in bookstores on April 14.

You can also preorder it, right now, either through your local indie bookstore of choice or directly from my publisher @biblioasis.bsky.social:

www.biblioasis.com/shop/forthcoming/who-else-in-the-dark-headed-there/

Praise for Who Else in the Dark Headed There:

“Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme—as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly.”
—Jan Zwicky

If you're a reviewer or bookseller, and would like an advance copy, send Biblioasis a message!

We forget. Diffuse. Self-anaesthetize. But the body retains what it’s known.

Set in the stark northern Alberta of the 80s and 90s — in Peace Country — these poems are apparitions, steam rising off soil newly turned by spade or excavator.

Memory, syntax, point of view, these shift. But childhood can’t be revised.

At its centre a son is up against the disappearance of his mother.

I’m grateful it will soon be in the world, though for a while I wasn’t sure I wanted it to exist.

An image of a book's front cover. The book is called "Who Else in the Dark Headed There", a new book of poems by Canadian author Garth Martens. Poet Jan Zwicky says of the book: "Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme - as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly." The publisher is Biblioasis Publishing. The poems are set in northern Alberta. Garth Martens lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Keywords: Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature, Small Press, Small Press Publishing, Indie Bookstores, Poetry Collection, New poetry 2026, Indie Press, Indie Publisher, Grief Writing.

Some news.

I have a new book of poetry out this April with @biblioasis.bsky.social. It's called Who Else in the Dark Headed There.

Opinion | Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today

Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/o...

Hope you can pre-order this wherever you buy your books. Pre-ordering really helps publishers of poetry in particular.

Thank you @publisherswkly.bsky.social !

SADIQA DE MEIJER Fieldwork starling burdock mullien clover dandelion“In the back seat of my parents' car, I liked to put my finger on the window and write long cursive words on the pastures. I wanted the seat on the right, beca...

Her brilliant 2024 Page Lecture in this glorious limited edition KFB/Fieldnotes publication.

“Decades later, I stood at the edge of a field that was blank with snow, and I felt again that old urge to write on it."

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Fieldwork #KFB #fieldnotes
www.knifeforkbook.shop/store/p197/S...

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

Open cardboard box filled with advanced reader copies of Don Gillmor's novel 'Cherry Beach'. Four copies of the novel are visible face-up, with the cover featuring a cool red-blue gradient coloured sky and partial apartment buildings.

New books 👀🍒

What better way to start off the week than with a fresh batch of ARCs for Don Gillmor's novel CHERRY BEACH?

“ICE Out”: Tens of Thousands March in Minnesota in General Strike Against Immigration Raids Tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved the bitter cold in Minneapolis on Friday to demand ”ICE out.” The march was organized by faith and labor leaders and was accompanied by calls for an economic bl...

“ICE Out”: Tens of Thousands March in Minnesota in General Strike Against Immigration Raids

January 21, 2026 At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this morning, a visibly exhausted president of the United States of America rambled in angry free association in a speech before the world’s leaders.

January 21, 2026

Congratulations to Karen Solie on winning the TS Eliot Prize for her most recent collection Wellwater, published by @picadorbooks.bsky.social

Karen Solie teaches for half the year at St Andrews University and lives the rest of her time in Canada. Karen is part of @northseapoets.bsky.social group.

Karen Solie’s Wellwater wins TS Eliot poetry prize Poet’s sixth collection explores the destruction of the natural world, with a perspective shaped by her upbringing in rural Canada

Heck yes! It's a damn good book, maybe Solie's best (which is saying a lot!).

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

A man is sewing button holes into the wings of moths. The wings tear, and the man keeps sewing. It is long ago. The world still has an end. The man carries the moths there. Gently. They begin their long falling.

Anne-Marie Turza

@houseofanansi.bsky.social

Anne-Marie Turza is the inaugural winner of the Writers’ Trust Board Fellowship. The #WTFellowship rewards one writer annually with $50K and a residency at the @banffcentre.bsky.social for Arts and Creativity. Turza’s win marks the start of WT’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

B.C. poet Anne-Marie Turza wins inaugural Writer’s Trust Board Fellowship | CBC Books The inaugural program rewards one mid-career writer annually for "exceptional creative ability and outstanding promise in their publications to date."

Learn more here: www.cbc.ca/books/writer...

"I also take poetry seriously and I go to poetry when I want the opposite of nursing. I'm very serious about being a student and wanting to feel like a novice in relation to poetry and I think that the genre is very welcoming to writers like me. Elasticity is one of poetry's chief characteristics."

Says Turza in the CBC article below: "As a nurse, I'm called on to be very practical, evidence-based ... and a person who will dependably do the safest thing in whatever the given circumstance might be. I take this work very seriously...."

... There is often a fairy tale quality to her imagery, a surreality; at other turns, she transforms the grit of everyday life into a glorious marvel. Turza is one of our finest poets, a visionary whose work has the texture of prophecy.”

The jury citation: “Across the last decade, Anne-Marie Turza has become one of the most striking and idiosyncratic voices in Canadian poetry. Her sensibility is unmistakable: oblique, funny, touched with an unforced strangeness that feels like a genuinely new way of seeing...."

Anne-Marie is one of my closest friends—she's had an outsized influence on my own work and how I think about poetry—and one of Canada's best kept secrets. I can't think of a poet more deserving of so life-changing an award. Read poetry? Look for her work at your independent bookstore of choice!

January 12, 2026 Today, Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department, Navy Secretary John Phelan, and the Navy Department for violating his First Amendment right...

January 12, 2026