July 21: Three women

Three women who write poetry in extraordinarily different approaches complimented each-other wonderfully at the Art Bar on July 21.

One addressed people in her life in personal, declarative verses, another quietly voiced tiny and towering truths in softly-spoken, zen-like poems, while another found comic mileage in princess stories gone horribly wrong.

Nashira Dernesch‘s poems confront love, death and the everyday with honesty, unvarnished sincerity and kindness. She claims the goal of her poetry is “to make a feast of all her losses.” The poems from her chapbooks, It’s No Secret You’ll Feel Better and This Snowing Under are full of personal history. Nashira dedicated the reading to her sister, Shannon, who was on hand to listen for the first time.

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Once again, Souvankham Thammavongsa proved that neither a loud voice nor towering stature were required to command the attention of a room as she presented compact, keenly-crafted poems which focus on both the minute and the cosmic. Souvankham says the architecture of her verse concentrates on “material, proportion, and balance.”

Her 2007 poetry collection, Found, is now a short film.

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Poet, publisher and soon-to-be novelist Sandra Kasturi delivered an animated, frequently irreverent performance of work that drew on genres such as science-fiction, horror, fairy tales (the earlier, gut-level kind, before the Disney treatment), a hint of Gothic, bodice-ripping romance, along with a generous dollop of kitchen-sink humour. Young mistress, behave!

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- Stephen Humphrey