My 2017 year in reading was for a third or fourth time, a #95books challenge to read more than the supposed amount GW Bush was able to crank out while in office. I read 101, ending the year last night with Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead – a fitting book of poems for an awful year.

Because Excel lets me track information, and because it is interesting to see if my reading  follows any curves, I know that poetry made up 49% of my reading, fiction 27%, non fiction 16%, “other” 3% and graphic novels 1%. Sorry, no plays.

The breakdowns are not rigorous and there are lots of other metrics I could track for, but here are a few wide swathes that are imperfect in their definitions and divisions:

71% of the titles were written by women. 24% by men. 4% by non binary authors. 1% coauthored.

68% of the authors of the books I read self-identified as straight, 20% as LGBTQ, 12% I didn’t have info on.

63% of the authors are white, 37% of the authors on the list are people of colour. 14% of them are Indigenous authors.

76% of the authors are Canadian and 22% from the US. I read only 2% of authors from outside North America? How did that happen?

It’s always funny to look back at the year though titles. In some places the titles are more accurate markers than any calendar entries: I can perfectly recall who lent me the book, who I was while I read it, where I was when I finished it. The next book I am reading is Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith and unless I finish it today, it will appear on next year’s list on December 31 2018.

The Painted Drum – Louise Erlich

Born a Crime – Trevor Noah

New and Selected Poems,1956-1996 – Phillip Appelman

Driving Force – Dick Francis

10lb Penalty – Dick Francis

Status Update – Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang

Passage – Gwen Benaway

Fun House – Alison Bechdel

The Chick at the Back of the Church-Billie Livingstone

(alive) – Rhea Tregebov

Peace in Duress – Janet Rogers

The Woods – Amber McMillan

Hologram – PK Page

A Perimeter – rob mclennan

Defending Darkness – Pamela Porter

Broom – Brecken Hancock

Friendly Fire – Danielle LaFrance

Memoirs of a Polar Bear – Yoko Tawada

In the Darkroom – Susan Faludi

Born Out of This – Christine Lowther

Leak – Kate Hargreaves

Nochita – Dia Felix

Swing Time – Zadie Smith

Milk Black Carbon – Joan Naviyuk Kane

Prosopopoeia – Shazia Hafiz Ramji;Silo Society/Right Hand Hymns – Aidan Chafe; Good for Nothing – Curtis LeBlanc

Black Trumpet – Evan Mallett

The Divinity Gene – Matthew J. Trafford

Indigenous Writes- Chelsea Vowel

This Accident of Being Lost – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Son of a Trickster – Eden Robinson

Calling Down The Sky – Rosanna Deerchild

The Best Kind of People – Zoe Whitall

Patterns on Black Ice – Louise Vacca Dawe

Snow Feathers – Writers North of 54

Skung Cabbage – Writers North of 54

Bad Ideas – Michael V. Smith

Prologue for the Age of Consequence – Garth Martens

An Honest Woman – Jonina Kirton

LaRose- Louise Erdich

Everything is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person

A Stitch of Time – Lauren Marks

Canyon Creek: A Script – Sheila Peters

The Earth Remembers Everything – Adrienne Fitzpatrick

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead

The High Mountains of Portugal – Yann Martel

He Wants – Alison Moore

The Art of Growing Old – Marie de Hennezel

Where it Hurts – Sarah de Leeuw

A Wall of Light – Edeet Ravel

Grayling – Gillian Wigmore

Terra Incognita – Adebe DeRango-Adem

Metanoia – Sharon McCartney

Octopus Poems – Patrick Warner

Adult Onset – Ann-Marie MacDonald

Throaty Wipes- Susan Holbrook

Lanterns at Guantánamo – Jordan Scott

How Festive the Ambulance – Kim Fu

Ghost Town – Susan Telfer

Heaven’s Thieves – Sue Sinclair

Washita – Patrick Lane

Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines – Jason Heroux

Medic Against Bomb – Frederick Foote

They Called me Number One – Bev Sellars

Knockdown – Dick Francis

The Signature of All Things – Elizabeth Gilbert

We Are Not Citizens We Are Magicians – Jordan Abel, Rae Armantrout, Juliane Okot Bitek, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Mercedes Eng, Jasmine Gibson, Dionne Lee, Cecily Nicholson

Hard Body Candidate for Soft Embrace – Nicole Dumas

Commonwealth – Ann Patchett

The Siege – Helen Dunmore

To Love the Coming End – Leanne Dunic

Someone You Love is Gone – Gurjinder Basran

God in Pink – Hasan Namir

Flightpaths – Heidi Greco

The Revolving City – Wayde Compton and Renee Sarojini Saklikar

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name – Vendela Vida

Perpetual – Rita Wong and Cindy Mochizuki

Still No Word – Shannon Webb-Cambell

Delirium for Solo Harp – Nadine McInnis

Next year, For Sure – Zoey Leigh Peterson

Brother – David Chariandy

300 Arguments – Sarah Manguso

The Dog Lover Unit – Rachel Rose

My Ariel- Sina Queyras

Silvija – Sandra Ridley

Don’t Tell Me What to Do – Dina del Bucchia

3 Summers – Lisa Robertson

Afterglow – Eileen Myles

Linger, Still – Aislinn Hunter

Bad Endings – Carleigh Baker

Wayside Sang – Cecily Nicholson

Refugium – Yvonne Blomer, ed

Ecodeviance (soma)tics for the Future Wilderness – CA Conrad

Intertidal – Daphne Marlatt

Voodoo Hypothesis – Canisia Lubrin

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

Advice from the Lights – Steph Burt

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes – Mercedes Eng

Cool For You – Eileen Myles

Float – Anne Carson

Left Unsaid – Joan Flood

Don’t Call Us Dead – Danez Smith

Last night, June 8, 2017, Ice Theatre of New York held its Spring Unplugged at Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers. It kicked off with a performance of the poem “School Figures” from serpentine loop skated by Denise Beaumont, Elisabeth L’Heureux, Katherine Mangiardi (above) and Wendy Wilke. Big thanks to Moira North for inviting this collaboration and to all the ITNY staff for a spectacular night which culminated in a spectacular sunset.

I was so happy to be there with friends and family, including my mother Tenley Albright, Douglas Webster and Steffani Bennett (pictured) below with John Kline.

Beautiful performances of the night included “Alberta Biography” skated by Eliot Halverson (in a plaid Canadian shirt) to bird calls. It was choreographed by Fred Nowosad and reset by Moira North. Eliot’s deep edges, humour and skill made this fascinating piece a stand out. And Joel Dear and Christian Erwin’s luscious “In Passing” was a stunning example of single gender pairs. Their connection to their choreography and their supple musculature were a real pleasure.

Bust magazine is one of the few general interest magazines to include poetry in its book reviews section. In fact, they have a Poetry Corner and it is written by three-book author, director, and actor Amber Tamblyn. The April/May issue includes her review of serpentine loop.

How exciting is this review? Very. Not only because it puts serpentine loop in conversation with the slate of interesting books in the issue but because it leaps over the 49th parallel, that invisible yet dense divide between US and Canadian readers. As a writer rooted with one foot on each side of the border, this feels great. And being a long-time Bust fan myself I am thrilled. This sort of support in the form of a considered, attentive review is a real gift. Here it is:

In poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s beautiful debut collection, serpentine loop (Anvil Press), she explores the magnificence of life’s circular tropes through the lens of figure skating; the repetition of painful events, the balancing dance of love and desire, the tough climates of an existentially glacial world. In “Outdoors, Ice” Gardiner, a former figure skater who hails from Vancouver, writes: “Through an ice hole. Hidden from the/moonlight in the shadow of a bridge. The delayed/surfacing of the body was probably due to its being/pinned under an ice sheet….” The poem in and of itself is shaped like a circle, shedding light on a mysterious frozen body discovered by children. In “Main Artery Along the River,” Gardiner writes of finding a man who has just been in a severe car accident: “For days the sensation of his open mouth turns you/off food. Eat out of duty./The wounded take all forms.” With too many great poems inside to quote, Gardiner’s lush, piercing collection is layered with climatological subtext and personal history, sure enough of its voice to thaw the coldest of hearts.

Thank you to the League of Canadian Poets for including serpentine loop on the RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD 2017 SHORTLIST. I am delighted to have a connection with this excellent group of poets! The other nominees are:

Disturbing the Buddha by Barry Dempster (Brick Books) | silent sister: the mastectomy poems by Beth Everest (Frontenac House) | Serpentine Loop by Elee Kraljii Gardiner (Anvil Press) | Burning in this Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe (Coteau Books) | The Waking Comes Late by Steven Heighton (House of Anansi Press) | Après Satie – For Two and Four Hands by Dean Steadman (Brick Books)

The winner will be announced in June in Toronto.

 

On April 5, 2017 at 1pm Ice Theatre of New York is skating one of my poems (“School Figures”) during their half hour performance at the gorgeous outdoor landmark, Rockefeller Center. If you are in NYC and free on lunch hour, this Wednesday will be a treat – it includes a program by Canadian skater Elladj Baldé. Brian Orser, who is teaching a seminar later in the week, will be there, too. I first skated at Rock Center when I was eight years old and performed with my mother at the lighting of the Christmas tree. I’m sorry not to make it – if you go, I’d love to see photos or video.

Thank you, Ice Theatre skaters and directors, for bringing this poem to the ice!

 

Thank you to everyone who stayed up late for our Skate the Book event on March 24, 2017!

It was wonderful to see so many people out for an evening of words and movement. As you’ll see in the video below, I read a poem (“Learning to Read and Write”) and invited Douglas Webster to speak about the similarities between skating and writing (edges, paragraphs, brackets, scribes, etc.). We heard a quick artist’s talk by Elin Schran about how she choreographed a book of poems as a skating program. Both Douglas and Elin were so generous with their time – they flew in from Boston the night before and never showed signs of jet lag! Douglas, who choreographed for Disney on Ice for ten years and does tons of work for tv and touring shows, and Elin, who skated with Ice Capades and runs Frozen Frog Productions, made all of this look easy.

We snacked and chatted and then, when the public session was cleared, we went downstairs in the Hillcrest Community Centre and we all got our skates on.

I was amazed how split the crowd was – 50% skaters, 50% writers! Some of the skaters were people we bumped into on a UBC freestyle session earlier in the day (Giovanni! Alexa!); others heard about it through the grapevine. Giovanni offered to sharpen Elin’s and Douglas’ skates at Cyclone Taylor, where he reconnected with Neal Countryman (who was Prince Philip in Disney on Ice). Some of the literary community members included Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, Lindsay Brown, Sarah Turner, Mohammed Kebbewar, Elena Johnson, and Mikaela Asfour, daughter of my V6A co-editor John Asfour. Leah Horlick, Anne Fleming and Gilles Cyrenne grabbed a quick photo with me after the reading. And my excellent Anvil Press Publishers Karen Green and Brian Kaufman hung in the back. Poet/doctor/tango dancer Karen Shklanka skated, too!

We all took the ice while Elin and Douglas warmed up for their presentation of “Meditation”, a duo figures demonstration with an element of moves in the field, a series of edges. Although there were only two of them they captured the sense of a school of fish or flock of birds. In fact, those moves are called “flocking”. Thanks, Lindsay Brown, for whipping out the iPhone in time to catch this!

As they skated figure eights and serpentine loops I read the poem “School Figures” over the music – I wish the soundsystem had been more collaborative, but tried my best to project. Again, so good to work with professionals who can pivot on a dime. Literally.

What was wonderful was to be on ice as they skated – we were watching near the hockey box. We could hear the edges and feel the air moving as they skated past.

Elin performed the Canadian debut of “Serpentine Loop” – you can see it here – which is a physical representation of what I am trying to evoke with words. Elin read my manuscript, drew key words out of it, thought about the structure and movement of the ideas and then turned it into a skated choreography. Not only is that a huge artistic gift for me, but it’s a new way of working for her, and funny enough, it took quite some time for the program to settle down – like mercury it slipped away and moved, shifted. Each time I have seen her skate it I have loved it even thought it has been different! She is so gifted!

A surprise of the night was the gift of not one but TWO pairs teams. Diana Barkley and Geoff Squires are Adult World Champions (they learned dance pairs as adults) – and they performed a fantastic swingy number. They are coached by Canadian Olympians Megan Wing and Aaron Lowe.

A second team, Canadian National Seniors Haley Sales and Nikolas Wamsteeker, who are BC Regional Champions, did their show number.

If you have never been on ice with a high-level dance team you may not have any idea of the energy flying over the surface.

They were fantastic – and you will surely be seeing much more of them! They had been up since 4am but were completely energized. We hope we get to collaborate in some way, shape or form.

 

Another gift was a visit with skating coach Jocelyn McNeil and her daughter, Tenley, who is named after our mom, Tenley Albright! I met Jocelyn at a reading at PulpFiction Books in the fall and was so happy to introduce Elin.

Here’s a group photo, by the intrepid Liisa Hannus, who shot all of the photos for the night. She even double-handed stills and video at one point! For this picture she walked out on ice before she even had her skates on. And no falling!