Upcoming Events
Poets Lesley-Anne Evans and Ruth Daniell will be a special guests at the upcoming book launch of Garth Martens’ Who Else in the Dark Headed There. Lesley-Anne will read from her forthcoming collection to be published by Ronsdale Press in Spring, 2027. She will have books for sale.
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Doors open at 6:30 pm, event start at 7 pm
Benvoulin Church, 2279 Benvoulin Road, Kelowna
Light refreshments and a Q&A will follow the readings.
In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour.
A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.
Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.
Praise for Who Else in the Dark Headed There
“Poems of intense emotion, the torque on the language extreme—as it must be, reaching this far into the dark, this honestly.”
—Jan Zwicky
Who Else in the Dark Headed There is now available for pre-order at your local bookstore:
Kelowna: Mosaic Books.
Victoria: Books & Shenanigans, Munro’s Books, Bolen Books, Ivy’s Bookshop.
Sidney: Tanner’s Books.
Or, if you prefer, you can order it directly from the publisher.
Lesley-Anne Evans 