“Dani Couture’s first poetry collection Good Meat, explores a world of inescapable shared physicality: “unable to tell / what difference between animal and woman, steel cuts both / with the same blind instinct. Couture’s observational free verse poems are precise, taut with meaning, and quietly filled with curiosities of fact and phrase that may prompt scurrying to reference materials (Really? The whale exploded? In downtown traffic?). Her symbols reveal owners via their objects, and consider both owners and objects through the thematic proscenium of meat. Vignettes of hunting, travel, family, intimacy, and appetite suggest the skills needed to survive them: “if only someone had cared enough / to teach me how to filet what’s offered / to the size of my hunger. In Good Meat, flesh is the site of self, a source of nourishment, and a host to disease. It comforts and challenges, grows and decays.”
–Books in Canada
For your own personal serving, you can order Good Meat from your favourite local bookstore. My suggestions for the Toronto area are This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, Pages Books, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore and The U of T Bookstore.
Jim Johnstone, Paul Vermeersch, Colin Carberry, Karen Press, Rick Crilly, Jacob Scheier, Adrienne Weiss, Rabea Murtaza, John McFetridge and myself.
The I.V. Lounge Reading Series has been running from 1998 - 2008 and still going strong, featuring emerging and established writers, poets and fiction writers.
The captains, past and present, of the I.V. Lounge Reading Series: Alex Boyd and Paul Vermeersch.
(Photo: Dani Couture)
Open Book Toronto also posted photos from the evening.
March 18, 2008 at 8:00 am · Filed under Readings and tagged: Reading
Tuesday, March 25
7:15 pm
Dora Keogh Irish Pub, 141 Danforth Ave., Toronto, Ontario
The headline event for the evening will feature readings from Exile’s new “The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwan” to be performed by Meaghan Strimas, Zoe Garnett and Rosemary Sullivan as three voices for different periods of poetry, prose and drama excellence.
First round readings will be given by Exile Quarterly authors Ailsa Kay, Christopher Adamson, Dani Couture and 2007 Journey Prize 19 selectee Rebecca Rosenblum.
Brenda Schmidt, writer, painter, birdwatcher, bog walker, author of A Haunting Sun (2001), More Than Three Feet of Ice (2005), and Cantos from Wolverine Creek (forthcoming in April 2008), riffs on my Ringolo Snow Art.
Introducing, my Ringolo Snow Art installation: The Jan. 2008 Dorset Edition
Have you ever lived in a small space? Maybe a sunroom? A back porch? Attic space? Barracks? A bachelor apartment in downtown Toronto? Well, I invite you to (virtually) visit my shoebox.
“If I had a parking spot now, I might set it up as a dining room, wedged between the Caprice in space 17 and the Jeep in space 19. Be careful not to back into my best china.”
For those of you who don’t read the last pages or lines first like I do, I’ll let you know right now that there’s a sandwich recipe at the end of this post.
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On Feb. 27, you can read my essay “One pot living” in the Facts and Arguments Section of the Globe and Mail.
On March 25, you can listen to me read at Exile’s launch at the Dora Keogh (141 Danforth Ave., Toronto). 7:15 pm. Other lovely readers include Meaghan Strimas, Zoe Garnett, Rosemary Sullivan, Ailsa Kay, Christopher Adamson and Rebecca Rosenblum.
On March 25, you can read my suite of seven poems in the latest issue of Exile Quarterly.
On May 9, you can listen to me read at the I.V. Lounge. More details to come.
On Feb. 19, today, I’ll give you a recipe for a sandwich, my favorite: Boil a sweet potato. Not too soft. Slice it into thin rounds. Bake the rounds in the oven. Cool. Get two pieces of hunters’ style rye bread. Add a layer of creamy cucumber salad dressing, alfalfa sprouts and two thick slices of ripe tomato. Now layer the rounds of roasted sweet potato. Press your large and lovely sandwich together. Cut. Enjoy. Wipe your mouth. Enjoy some more.
October 29, 2006, was the launch for “Good Meat” (Pedlar Press). The following photo essay was displayed to the thousands on hand for the event. *Thousands*. Okay, maybe not thousands. But there was a pumpkin.
P.S. *This* is what happens when I’m left alone for any amount of time.
Dani Couture's first book, Good Meat, was published by Pedlar Press (2006); she has a second collection forthcoming from Pedlar, "The Handbook," and she is working on a novel, "Black Bear on Water."
Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers across Canada, including This Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Taddle Creek, Arc and The Fiddlehead. She is co-editor of Northern Poetry Review. Dani's first chapbook, midnight grocery (Believe Your Own Press), was mentioned in NOW Magazine's Best of Toronto 2005 edition, and her poem "Union Station" won second place in This Magazine's The Great Canadian Literary Hunt 2007.
Dani was born on a military base to a Francophone father and an Anglophone mother, both of whom were enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. The doctor was singing the theme song to “Hockey Night in Canada” when she was born. She has lived in ten cities, including North Bay, Vancouver, Windsor and Taichung, Taiwan. Dani currently lives in a very small apartment in Toronto.
Contact: dani.couture@gmail.com
