Please join us for this special event—the launch of Janet Rogers’ powerful new poetry collection, Totem Poles and Railroads, accompanied by a performance from Mohawk Blues musician Murray Porter.
Date/Time: Nov 18 2016, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Vancouver, Grunt Gallery
Totem Poles and Railroads succinctly defines the 500-year-old relationship between Indigenous nations and the corporation of Canada. In this, her fifth poetry collection, Janet Rogers expands on that definition with a playful, culturally powerful and, at times, experimental voice. She pays honour to her poetic characters—real and imagined, historical and present day—from Sacajawea to Nina Simone. Placing poetry at the centre of our current post-residential school/present-day reconciliation reality, Rogers’ poems are expansive and intimate, challenging, thought-provoking and always personal.
Copies of the books will be available for sale for $15.
JANET ROGERS
“Janet Rogers is as fearless as an eagle feather and as forensic as a tomahawk. This Indigenous Canadian poet says what E.Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) wanted to say, but couldn’t, because the time wasn’t ripe, a century back, for a voice that is unhindered by politesse and undiplomatic in outrage. But now’s the time for Janet Rogers, who knows that our lopped-down forests are ‘not / romantic trees / with sentiment / running beneath,’ but represent a wilderness colonized by a society where ‘injustice rains / upon us constant.’ Love the directness of this poet, who is about peace-seeking: ‘we have adopted / each other / and adapted / to living / like this.’ Rogers moves easily among all the registers of Canuck poetics, from giving us symbolic imagery (‘… words left flapping / like tattered flags / over parliament’s decaying / brick home’) to giving us raw truth (‘the tears of a prime minister / won’t wipe away racism’). Pick up Janet Rogers, this powerful, Red-letter woman, and find yourself feeling uncomfortable, but no longer uninformed.” —George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2016-17)
MURRAY PORTER
2012 JUNO Award Winner for `Aboriginal Album of the Year' for “Songs Lived & Life Played,” Murray Porter’s music has an instantly recognizable sound. The Mohawk piano player from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory brings his culture and history to the masses through his music. With a mix of blues, country, and humour, Porter’s gravelly, soulful voice sings not only of the history and contemporary stories of the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, but also universal themes of love, lost and found. He has spent over 30 years playing his self-taught unique style of foot-stomping, hand clapping blues piano around the world.
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