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: Thursday, April 30
Time: Doors at 6:30 p.m. Event at 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Caffe Fantastico, 965 Kings Rd, Victoria
Martens will be joined by poets ALI BLYTHE, MELANIE SIEBERT, and ANNE-MARIE TURZA for an evening of readings and celebration. Books will be available for purchase and signing, courtesy of .
Free to attend. Come early to enjoy dinner and drinks.
~
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
~
ALI BLYTHE is the author of a trilogy of poetry collections exploring trans poetics: Twoism, Hymnswitch, and Stedfast. His work has been anthologized nationally and internationally, including in The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Best Canadian Essays, and Best Canadian Poetry. Of his work, CAConrad has said, "Ali Blythe writes the kind of poems I always want in my life, a laser focus dancing down the page" and Kazim Ali has called his lines "so carefully tuned, they go beyond human knowledge and into the forest of wild knowledges." He lives in Victoria BC with his partner, poet Melanie Siebert, and is at work on a new collection, Transmute.
In Stedfast, Ali Blythe breaks apart Keats’s sonnet “Bright star” and reassembles it into a sequence of twenty-eight poems that write queer devotion into the Romantic canon. Set over one night beside a sleeping lover, the poet wrestles with questions of illusion and reality, endurance and transience. Held taut in formal quivers of short lines, each poem is shot through with eros — to address, to dress and undress, the subject of the love poem and perhaps love itself.
~
MELANIE SIEBERT is the author of two poetry collections: Signal Infinities, winner of the D.C. Reid Poetry Prize, and Deepwater Vee, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. Her nonfiction book Heads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing for young readers in Canada. Melanie is a therapist and is currently an artist-in-residence at UVic's Centre for the Study of Religion and Society.
Melanie Siebert’s most recent poetry collection, Signal Infinities, explores the intelligences and limits of the body, as a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake. As pain arrives. As glaciers and ancient forests disappear. With unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes and chemical shifts. River Halen says Signal Infinities is “a stunning, intricately intelligent book” that is “beautiful, surprising, provocative.”
~
ANNE-MARIE TURZA is the author of two collections of poetry, The Quiet (Anansi, 2014) and Fugue with Bedbug (Anansi, 2022), and the chapbook Slip Minute (Baseline, 2018). She was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and won the inaugural Writer’s Trust Board Fellowship (2026) for her body of work.
In Anne-Marie Turza's eagerly awaited second collection, be startled by metaphysical snails and the ghosts of footnotes in the dark. Fugue With Bedbug is part musical reference, part portraiture, a series of uncanny poems attending to time and mortality, an eccentric essay, and a musical score. Using the fugue form as a foil and a quiet compositional strategy, poet Anne-Marie Turza argues that the mission: “in afterthought, was Jell-O, a salad of delicate intent and shimmy . . .”
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Caffe Fantastico, 965 Kings Road, Victoria, Canada
CAD 0.00
