About this Event
Join us to celebrate the launch of Who Else in the Dark Headed There, a new poetry collection by Garth Martens.
Date: Tuesday, April 14
Time: Doors at 6:30 p.m. Event at 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Benvoulin Church, 2279 Benvoulin Rd, Kelowna
Martens will be joined by poets RUTH DANIELL and LESLEY-ANNE EVANS for an evening of readings and celebration. Books will be available for purchase and signing, courtesy of Mosaic Books.
Free to attend. Light refreshments and a Q&A after the event. No RSVP necessary to attend, but if you order a free ticket through Eventbrite it will help us prepare enough refreshments.
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GARTH MARTENS is the author of and . 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, Grain, PRISM, High Horse, Hawkeye, 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. You can find him on Instagram at .
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.
“Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme—as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly.”
—Jan Zwicky
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LESLEY-ANNE EVANS is an Irish-Canadian poet living in Kelowna, BC. In 2025, she graduated with an MA in Poetry with Distinction from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. Her poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee Lit Mag, EVENT Magazine, CV-2, The Antigonish Review, Letters Journal (Yale), and other publications. Mute Swan, Poems for Maria Queen of the World (The St. Thomas Poetry Series) is her first collection.
Lesley-Anne is a photographer, librettist, and arts facilitator who contributes to the common good. She hosts Feeny Wood, a woodland retreat for creatives and spiritual seekers. Lesley-Anne’s second collection is forthcoming from Ronsdale Press, spring 2027. laevans.ca, feenywood.ca
Mute Swan explores the landscape of the voiceless. Drawing on her own experience, the poet navigates a way forward while creating space for others who are silenced or don’t belong. The poet, looking unflinchingly at injustice, impermanence, shame, longing, and love, offers a story of un-muting and spiritual awakening. Mute Swan is an allegory–a love letter calling us home.
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RUTH DANIELL is a speech arts teacher, a book editor, and an award-winning writer whose poems have appeared across North America. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Brightest Thing (Caitlin Press, 2019), explores fairy tales and the contemporary search for happily ever after. She lives in Kelowna, BC, in a house with rose bushes out front, where her progress on her second collection of poems is significantly slowed down but delightfully inspired by her four young children.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Benvoulin Heritage Church, 2279 Benvoulin Road, Kelowna, Canada
CAD 0.00
