From the desk of Lesley-Anne Evans. A quiet space for slow reflections, poem fragments, and updates on the road to my second collection (April 2027, Ronsdale Press). Honest words sent from the soil straight to your inbox.
Newsy news:
• two poems found a home in The Antigonish Review: Mother Love, and June 5th – 7th, both from Lesley-Anne’s forthcoming 2nd collection.
• the poem VOICE OF FIRE AS ANXIETY has landed in Belfast’s EASCAIRMagazine, Issue 4.
• Lesley-Anne is returning to Belfast in September/October to catch up with poet friends, and relations. She plans to attend workshops and lectures at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and as many lit festivals and open mics as time allows.
• Lesley-Anne has been invited into the world of book reviews. It is proving to be an exciting and daunting task to close read, and seek the heart and intention of a collection of poems, all with great care. Her debut review will be coming out in the BC Review in September.
Launching new Substack:
From the desk of Lesley-Anne Evans, a new Substack“Word from Feeny Wood.”A quiet space for slow reflections, poem fragments, and updates on the road to my second collection (April 2027, Ronsdale Press). Honest words sent from the soil straight to your inbox.
Use this QR code to navigate to “Word from Feeny Wood” and subscribe. Share with your friends.
Interview
The current edition of Faith Today Magazine features a Q + A with Lesley-Anne Evans on public readings, studying in Belfast, and her upcoming poetry collection. You can link to the article here, and read the interview below.
Announcement
The most extraordinary thing has happened!
Lesley-Anne is thrilled to share that her next book is coming, Spring 2027 with RONSDALE PRESS and Wendy Atkinson, owner/publisher. Stay tuned for updates on this new project. You can follow along on Instagram @lesleyanneevanspoetry
Lesley-Anne injecting a little silliness into her day. Seville Spain, 2026
Past Event
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 new collection, forthcoming in Spring 2027. Copies of her debut book of poems, “Mute Swan” from The St. Thomas Poetry Series (2021), will be available for purchase and signing by the author.
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
