Plan 99 Poetry Cabaret with Alexandra Oliver and Nick Thran
Hosted by David O’Meara
In Person Poetry
Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats.
In her acclaimed new collection, Let The Empire Down, Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of North America to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals–on the streets, by rivers, in museums, in playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie–she reflects on issues of escape, exile, memory and identity, while traveling back into her own past.
Mayor Snow, by Nick Thran, is about both the abdication and acceptance of responsibilities and inheritance: be they civic, personal, poetic. It begins with speaker-less evocations of corrupt and oppressive political atmospheres and ends with first-person narrative tales of domestic life in Al Purdy's refurbished A-frame. All of these poems work in a shadow, be they forebears, tabloids, cultural markers or government watchdogs.
Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.
