Book Launch with Garth Martens and Alex Boyd

Celebrate writers Garth Martens and Alex Boyd as they read from their new poetry and non-fiction books at Little Wren Books. Join poet Garth Martens and writer Alex Boyd for the London launch of their new books: Take This For the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. Books will be sold on site by Little Wren Books. London, Ontario — Double Book Launch Saturday, Oct. 24, 4–6 p.m. Little Wren Books 502 Adelaide Street North, London, ON N6B 3J2 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, Unlikely Stories, 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 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 Arresting fragments emerge from a relentless invocation of half scenes, stitched together with the singular logic of poetic memory (which is to say, with mystery.) —Literary Review of Canada The fragmented poems showcase an urgent relationship with language that is sensory, emotive and captivating. —CBC Books 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, Unlikely Stories, 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. ALEX BOYD Pulling from twenty-five years of essays, articles, and reviews, Alex Boyd’s Take This for the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life is a curious look at art and culture in a rapidly changing world. Boldly tackling topics ranging from faith to aging to memorable jobs, Boyd’s work finds inspiration in the philosophies of writers like George Orwell, William Stafford, and Charlotte Brontë. If you’ve ever wondered about the value of poetry in the 21st century, or whether graffiti is a valid art form, Take This for the Pain reveals how art can reinforce selfhood and galvanize social change. Moreover, it includes a range of reviews that covers a number of overlooked, deeply worthy books. Alex Boyd is a writer who has embraced befuddlement—at the world, and the weirdoes inside it, at the systems under which we labour and lament. These essays are wise, full of wit, and—most important—a blast to read. Some of the fun is in watching a guy stumble through the seasons of life, learning, unlearning, considering, reconsidering. Some of it’s in seeing him hold on, heroically, to unhip ideas like the power of books to set our minds right. Reading Take This for the Pain is like eavesdropping on a chat between brilliant disembodied brains—the author, the progenitors who fed and watered his writing, and his cohort, with whose work he so energetically wrestles. You’ll want to chime in, pile on—agree, disagree, nod your head, frown—and that’s part of the fun too. —David Whitton, author of Seven Down Alex Boyd helped establish Best Canadian Essays, co-editing the first two collections. His books of poems are Making Bones Walk (2007) and The Least Important Man (2012). In 2018 his first novel was published: Army of the Brave and Accidental, reviewed as “timely, original and profound.” Most recently, a collection of essays has been published, Take This for the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life.