Event Info
These Burning Streets: Poetry Booklaunch (Book by g20 prisoner Kelly Pflug-Back): Ruby Smith Diaz, Juliet Belmas, Jeremy Loveday, Comrade Black, Matthew Cook, Scott Brown, Monkey Wrench
Come out to the book launch of Kelly Pflug-Back's first book of poetry published...
7:00pm
Artists
spoken word and political performance style poetry from Victoria BC
Event Description
Come out to the book launch of Kelly Pflug-Back's first book of poetry published by Combustion Books.
Readings by: Ruby Smith Diaz, Juliet Belmas, Jeremy Loveday, Mathew Cook, Scott Brown, Rayne Hartsorn, Star, Monkeywrench, Beki Leuschner, & Comrade Black
Friends of Kelly and local poets conspire to bring you reading of her poems their own poetry as well in support of Kelly who is serving 15 months in prison for g20 related charges.
The name of this collection of poetry is no mere hyperbole. When the G-20 met in Toronto, Canada in 2010 behind armed thugs and fortress walls to discuss the fate of the world, Kelly Pflug-Back was among those who took to the streets to counter it with the militancy that the situation demanded. The cops dragged her off and tormented her in jail for a month while the government attempted to frame her as the leader of the infamously leaderless Black Bloc. Many of her charges were dropped, but she pleaded guilty to the destruction of several police cars and corporate storefronts and awaits sentencing. She was sentenced to fifteen months behind bars for daring to be free, for writing her poetry with action and words alike. Every dollar received by the publisher from the sale of this volume will go to aid her in her struggle against the state.
http://www.combustionbooks.org/products-page/poetry/these-burning-streets/
Links to Kelly's work: http://kellypflugback.wordpress.com/these-burning-streets/
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Camas Books is in a new location, only 1/2 a block from the old location. 2620 Quadra St, Victoria BC, Unceded Lekwungen territories. Kelly use to volunteer with Camas so this seems like an excellent place for her book to be launched. Camas is 100% volunteer run, non profit, dog friendsly and is wheelchair accessible.
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Here are some awesome cover blurbs:
“In this groundbreaking first collection, Kelly Pflug- Back has found a new way to use metaphor, audaciously collapsing the whole structure of what we believed was external and internal. Each poem is crammed with these new images that shock with recognition and drench the senses of the body.”
—Heather Spears, author and winner of the Governor-General’s Award in Poetry and the Pat Lowther Award
“There is something so visual about these words I can almost taste them! Poems graceful on the page, and full of grace in flight.”
—Susan Musgrave, author of Origami Dove
“From the deeply personal to the socio-political, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back’s voice in These Burning Streets resonates deeply within each of us. Arriving through shared chords of remembrance and tears, it touches those once beautiful, scarred places inside that we most always ignore, cover, hide.”
—Bruce Kauffman, poet, editor, radio show host of “Finding a Voice” on CFRC 101.9fm.
“...at once a book of windows into fantastical places, an album of love songs for the small things we’ve all forgotten, and a celebratory political manifesto for worlds we’ve yet to imagine... a simply stunning first collection from a wise and talented emerging poet.”
—Leanne Simpson, author of Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence.
“Pflug-Back is a poet who speaks the truth—more accurately, shouts the truth, just as Milton Acorn did in his best poems.”
—Chris Faiers, award winning author first ever recipient of the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award
Venue
2620 Quadra Street
since 2007