Literary: Meredith Quartermain and Steven Ross Smith

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Friday, June 15th
7:30 PM
People's Co-op Bookstore
1391 Commercial Drive
Vancouver, BC
1-888-511-5556

All are welcome!
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Celebrate Canadian Poetry this June! People's Co-op Bookstore and
NeWest Press invite you to sit back and enjoy a joint reading from
Vancouver Walking by award-winning poet Meredith Quartermain and
Fluttertongue 4: adagio for the pressured surround by acclaimed poet
Steven Ross Smith.

Praise for Vancouver Walking:

"In Vancouver Walking Meredith Quartermain sights the coordinates of
tangible and historical attentions as she moves through an amazement
of place and language. The word here is foot and eye, step by step,
crisscrossing the city with the grids and layers of its own minute
particulars and articulating the truth of the imagination, the
dynamics of the intersect. These poems listen carefully to the
yearning of place, the kind of naming a city answers to."
-Fred Wah, Diamond Grill

"Walking cinemas, civic memory tours, these poems are sites for the
eruption of public history chronically denied but there as trace in
the very names that mark our streets. Meredith Quartermain's
observant eye tracks what underlies or surrounds our daily routine,
she sees what routine blinds us to, and in the process constructs
some wonderfully trenchant slices of contemporary city life." -Daphne Marlatt

Fluttertongue 4: adagio for the pressured surround is poetry at its
most eloquent. Written as one long poem which weaves many themes
together, fluttertongue 4 discusses issues such as death, nature,
food, and familial relationships.

Praise for Fluttertongue 4:

"Here find your ears tugged by the tough tongues of one who-between
son & father-between illness & torture-on an I-land far
west-questions ownership '(my)' & isolation-by waiting 'before music
or after it'. Find a reverent, epigraphic, singular chorus that
leaves trails (in the old sense of strobe), a healing tumble toward
shine of the wide nouns & wild pronouns we trust & claim too
passively-a meditative, concessional poetry-a live-alogue, much
needed."
-Phil Hall, An Oak Hunch

"The mood is elegiac-though there are moments of rapt attention,
bliss-as over and over the poet tests the 'pressured surround,' the
'dizzy surround,' of language and its limits in conveying beauty and
suffering. What I so admire about this wandering (wondering) poem is
its humility: 'hesitant and sinuous,' it explores its own
limitations, the 'wound' at the heart of language and being-the wound
from which poetry sings."
-Hilary Clark, The Dwelling of Weather


To request review copies of these books, or to arrange an interview
with the authors, please contact Tiffany at 780-432-9427 or
marketing@newestpress.com.

At age 11, Meredith Quartermain left her home in Toronto and drove
with her family across Canada to the tiny, one-time silver boom
community of Argenta, British Columbia. While living there she
developed the strong sense of place that she carried with her
throughout her studies at the University of British Columbia, and
into every piece of writing since. In 1983 she was commissioned to
write a history of York House School, thus beginning her exploration
of Vancouver archival materials and pioneer narratives. Quartermain
is the author of a number of books, and the founder of a literary web
site called The News as well as the small literary press Nomados.

Steven Ross Smith was born in Toronto in 1945 and raised in the
Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. Smith's previous books of poetry
include blind zone, Transient Light, Sleepwalkers, which was
co-authored by Richard Truhlar, and Reading My Father's Book. Smith
has also published fiction and non-fiction, and has written for many
periodicals and anthologies. In addition to this, Smith creates,
records, and performs sound poetry. This is the fourth book in
Smith's fluttertongue series; all other fluttertongue books are all
still in print. He currently lives in Saskatoon, SK.
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Tiffany Regaudie
Marketing Coordinator
NeWest Press
201-8540-109 Street
Edmonton, AB T6G 1E6
t: 780-432-9427
f: 780-433-3179
*** Check out NeWest Press online at www.newestpress.com ***