HUNG Q TU and REG JOHANSON

Saturday October 28, 2006
8:00 pm
at Spartacus Books, 319 West Hastings, Vancouver BC

HUNG Q TU was born in Vietnam but grew up in San Diego, California, where he now lives. He is a founding editor of the San Francisco publishing collective Krupskaya, and author of three books of poetry; A Great Ravine (Parenthesis), Versimilitude (Atelos), and, most recently, Structures of Feeling (Krupskaya). The latter work is described by Tom Raworth: "Hung Q. Tu's poems push the mind into a nest of steel rods all hitting the surface of an unknown shape at the same moment: political and quotidian, in language demotic and arcane they acutely render the beauty of scorn." Or, in the poet's own words:

"Geopolitical or molten core go to hell

I was born on a hijacked plane
Now that nobody can go back
except to collect the effects

People can't afford to lose their heads"

Born in Leduc, Alberta, REG JOHANSON lives in East Vancouver, BC. Courage, My Love (Line Books, 2006), brings together a selection of works that have appeared over the last decade in W magazine, the chapbook Chips (Thuja, 2001), and in the anthologies Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005) and Companions and Horizons (WCL, 2005). Critical work on Standard English as a classist and racializing disciplinary practice, and on the political economy of cheating and plagiarism, has appeared in XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics and as Working Papers in Critical Practice #1 (recomposition.net); other essays on liquor policy, on the radical in poetry, on representations of missing women, and on global urbanization appear or are forthcoming in West Coast Line and The Rain Review. A former member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective and current co-director of the Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies, Johanson teaches comp and lit at Capilano College.

"There is a sense that everything seems packed& the courts packed, issues packaged, information packeted and the room I'm sitting in hopelessly cluttered. &. A build-up of negatives, to paraphrase P.Inman, with its own history and force of persuasion like favelas which make Disneyland that much less persuasive. Who's besieging whom? All this dialectically, mind you, as the welcome sign doubles as a doormat, gets starker and starker." - Hung Q Tu

the KOOTENAY SCHOOL of WRITING 309-207 West Hastings St. Vancouver, BC
Phone: 604.313.6903 www.kswnet.org for upcoming events