…which is my excuse for the dearth of blog entries. My neck was screwed up and caused an incredible amount of pain.
I’ll shall return with a proper journal type entry, I promise
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
HALEY’S POETRY STIRS AND SHAKES, KNOCKS AND SHOCKS
Heather Susan Haley, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, Ekstasis Editions
Vancouver, BC, Dec. 14, 2009 —Trailblazing poet, author, musician and media artist Heather Susan Haley’s new book, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, has hit the streets just in time for the holidays.
“Fierce, racy, full of stiletto irony, verve — yet rife with sensitivity. Three Blocks West of Wonderland is a highly fuelled poetic ride. Her LA, southern B.C. coast, energy-haunted world draws you electrically in and does not let you go. Like the subject of one of the elegies in this collection, Haley stirs, provokes the atmosphere.” – Author Russell Thornton,The Human Shore, House Built of Rain, Harbour Publishing.
Haley has been actively involved in her art for over a decade and has gained renown as an engaging performer and media artist; she is the author of a previous collection, Sideways (Anvil Press), Haley’s poetry has been selected for inclusion in numerous prestigious journals and anthologies including Geist and last year’s Verse Map of Vancouver.
Haley has been an editor for LA Weekly and publisher of Rattler and the Edgewise Café, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. Founder of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, her works have been official selections at dozens of international film festivals and she has shared her poetry and music with audiences around the world. Most recently she toured eastern Canada and the U.S. in support of her critically acclaimed AURAL Heather CD of spoken word songs, Princess Nut.
Much of Three Blocks West of Wonderland was written during her stint as artist in residence at the Banff Arts Centre and features place and travel poems alluding to post 9/11 angst and guilt here in our ‘safe’ zone.
Poet Laureate George McWhirter: “If you are a Rambling girl who wants to shirk and shake her motherland, read this jitters and jive guide to the other side of Canada and the world. Fads and fears take Air Canada wing (or Westjet’s). Sights seen turn into fables and metaphors, quirks of speech and character galore. As to the body of the language, the Canadian straightjacket lies like an old pair of stays on the stage in this diction stripper’s act. But there is a serious restlessness to Heather Haley’s serial observations — in the tradition of that great Canadian traveller in poetry, Ralph Gustafson’s: adagio notations, like his, on everything she sees and feels and musically reveals.”
Author Allan Briesmaster: “Rambunctious, relentlessly witty, visceral and vital, these poems move like a tilt-a-whirl and rollercoaster combined. Haley’s gallery of warts-and-all character studies and her portfolio of no-holds-barred travelogues bustle and bristle with forceful gestures, jolting details, and electric perceptions. Through them all, an indomitable spirit emerges: one that has taken its share of knocks and shocks and boldly prevails.”
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For an interview with Heather Haley, please contact:
Heather Susan Haley
778 861-4050
Order directly from the publisher.