Poets Garth Martens, Eve Joseph and Billeh Nickerson gathered for this event travel through very different landscapes: a mother’s disappearance, the haunted rooms of childhood, and a hospital stay that prompts reflections on mortality, luck, and survival. Through inventive and deeply attentive uses of language, each writer transforms lived experience into something unexpected, illuminating how memory reshapes the past, how imagination unsettles the ordinary, and how poetry can help us navigate uncertainty and change. Through loss, humour, wonder, and resilience, these poets reveal what endures and what becomes possible in the aftermath of transformation.

Location: Poetry Tent, UBC Robson Square

Type: Poetry

Moderator: Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Bramah’s Discovery: Book Three (Harbour Publishing)

Readers: Garth Martens, Who Else in the Dark Headed There (Biblioasis) | Eve Joseph, Dismantling (Anvil Press) | Billeh Nickerson, Blood Clot Banana Bag (Anvil Press)

About The Moderator

Renée Sarojini Saklikar

Renee Sarojini Saklikar is the author of six books, including the award-winning Children of Air India and Listening to the Bees. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Exile Editions, Chatelaine, The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. She was Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey (2015-2018), co-founded Lunch Poems at SFU, and teaches Creative Writing at Douglas College. Bramah’s Discovery is the third volume of her epic fantasy in verse series, THOTJBAP. She lives in East Vancouver.

About The Participants

Garth Martens

Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for Canada's 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, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is a co-founder and producer for Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. [Please add this last sentence if publishing online, but don't read it out at the event.] Find him on Instagram @garthmartens

Eve Joseph

Eve Joseph lives and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations. Her first two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010), were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. In the Slender Margin (HarperCollins 2014) won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry, Quarrels (Anvil, 2018), was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the ReLit Award and won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her work has been translated into German and Swedish.