Poetry Book Launch: Garth Martens with Zane Koss and Karen Houle

Join poet Garth Martens as he launches his new poetry book in Guelph alongside writers Zane Koss and Karen Houle at The Bookshelf Join poet Garth Martens at The Bookshelf as he launches his new book of poetry, Who Else in the Dark Headed There, alongside poet Zane Koss and novelist Karen Houle. Guelph, Ontario — Poetry Reading Oct. 28 Wednesday, 6-7:30 p.m. The Bookshelf 41 Quebec Street, Guelph, ON N1H 2T1 Readers: Garth Martens, Zane Koss, and Karen Houle. GARTH MARTENS In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Garth 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. Garth Martens is the author of Who Else in the Dark Headed There (Biblioasis), the chapbook Remediation (JackPine, 2018), and Prologue for the Age of Consequence (Anansi, 2014), for which he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, BODY Literature, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Fiddlehead, Vallum, Grain, Prism, Grain, Hawkeye Magazine, High Horse, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is co-founder of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives on Vancouver Island. Find him on Instagram @garthmartens. Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme—as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly. —Jan Zwicky, author of The Long Walk This is hard stuff, looked at with a cold eye. It’s beautiful, fierce, profoundly defensive, smart as heck, and intrusive. —Harold Rhenisch, The BC Review ZANE KOSS Zane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place. Zane Koss is a poet and translator living in Guelph, ON. He is the author of Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025), Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022), and several chapbooks of poetry. He is the co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022) and Karen Villeda’s String Theory (Cardboard House, 2024), with the North American Free Translation Agreement (NAFTA). He was born and raised in the East Kootenays, BC, and earned a doctorate at New York University. KAREN HOULE Houle was a Professor of Philosophy until a few years’ ago. Her university degrees focused first on biology, then history & philosophy of science, and finally political philosophy. As an academic, she was most known for her research and writing on Post-Humanist Ethics and Plant Philosophy. Then she became an urban farmer and a soil activist. She is also an author, having written three books of poetry: Ballast (Anansi, 2000), During (Gaspereau, 2005), and The Grand River Watershed: A Folk Ecology (Gaspereau, 2019), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in English-language poetry. For this reading, Houle will read from her novel-in-progress, “Handedness”.