two porcelain ducks and a poet

2008-01-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

New Digs

Please visit me at my new website:

www.danicouture.wordpress.com

2007-10-21T04:51:00.000-07:00

Allo, allo. In the next couple of weeks, I'll be reading--along with Alex Boyd--in Montreal, Fredericton, Mahone Bay and Halifax. So, see you there? Lovely.

Dani

Montreal, QUE
Reading with Carmine Starnino and Asa Boxer
Sat Oct 20, 12 Noon
Paragraphe Bookstore
2220 McGill College Ave

Fredericton, NB
Mon Oct 22, 8pm
Alumni Memorial lounge
University of New Brunswick

Mahone Bay, NS
Thurs Oct 25, 8pm
The Biscuit Eater – Bookstore and Café
16 Orchard St

Halifax, NS
Fri Oct 26, 12 Noon
Spring Garden Road Memorial Public Library
5381 Spring Garden Road

Halifax, NS
Fri Oct 26, 8pm
Venus Envy
1598 Barrington Street

2007-08-26T17:32:00.000-07:00

This, That, The Other Thing

Three of my (bear) poems are in the current edition of "This Magazine". You can view the poems online as well, but I encourage you to pick up the magazine--it's a good one.

3 poems

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Writing Outside the Margins

On Sunday, August 26, 2007, Xtra's WRITING OUTSIDE THE MARGINS festival of queer literature will quite literally take the works of LGBT writers to the street in a day-long interactive spectacle in celebration of literary arts, the first of its kind. This will be the most diverse literary celebration of the year!

We're closing down Church Street to present a dazzling array of reading and performance, along with a publishers' fair, in celebration of the best of the rainbow literati both local and international.

This Ain't The Rosedale Library Reading Room! Can't wait to crack the spine on the perfect book? Need a place to relax and escape the crowds? Join host Dani Couture in the This Ain't The Rosedale Library Reading Room. Located above the bookshop, the Reading Room will be the official chill out space for featured readers and festival goers alike! Get autographs, chat with friends, take a load off!

Writing Outside the Margins website

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Seen Reading

An incredibly addictive and well-crafted blog that puts the spotlight on readers. You always knew that reading was good for you, but who knew that reading about reading could satisfy like this. Pour some coffee, make some toast, you're going to be here for a while.

Seen Reading: Potluck

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Dani Couture & Alex Boyd: The East Coast Edition

Alex Boyd and I have scheduled a tour of the East Coast to promote our new books. We will be reading in Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton, Charlottetown, Halifax and Mahone Bay.

Details are on our Facebook group, but will be posted here closer to the tour.

Come out, have a pint with us. We like you. Yes, we like you very much.

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Taddle Creek 10

I have one poem--"The Threat of the Comfort Inn"--forthcoming in the next edition of Taddle Creek. And the next issue of Taddle Creek marks the magazine's tenth anniversary. Congratulations, TC! I'll bake you a cake. Cherry chip or banana, what's it going to be?

Taddle Creek website

2007-05-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Get Your Lit Out: POTLUCK

A Night of Readings

Presented by Three Ring Paper Productions

At A Space Gallery – 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 110

Get Your Lit Out – Potluck is the latest installment of the much talked about queer reading series occurring on Wednesday, June 20, 2007. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the evening will run until 10 p.m.

No recipes required – just sit back and enjoy Toronto’s hottest local authors as they serve up a night of kickass queer readings.

Hosted in the queer west end of the city at A Space Gallery (401 Richmond St. W., Suite 110), Get Your Lit Out – Potluck is a free, all ages event sponsored by community media partner Xtra! Light refreshments available.

Get Your Lit Out – Potluck is a literary extravaganza during pride featuring the phenomenal Shani Mootoo, Trey Anthony, Anna Camilleri, Debra Anderson, Gein Wong, and Dani Couture. Authors will read from previously published books or new works-in-progress. Books will be on sale and authors will be available for book signings.

Acclaimed comedian Dawn Whitwell will host the night – so prepare to get messy and leave your napkins at home!

The potluck is an entrenched lesbionic social event that we all love to hate or hate to love. At Get Your Lit Out – Potluck, six sizzling authors will bring something different to the table to stir you, heat you up, and leave you craving more – just in time to celebrate pride.

To get the dish, contact Three Ring Paper Productions (Organizer) at www.debraanderson.ca

For further inquiries please visit www.aspacegallery.org

Sponsored by community media partner Xtra!

2007-05-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

Loud Mouth

The lovely Trevor Cole added my short reading to his website, AuthorsAloud. AuthorsAloud is an independent library of short, recorded audio readings by Canadian authors of fiction and poetry.

Give 'er a listen: http://www.authorsaloud.com/readings/readings/couture.html"

2007-04-23T05:02:00.000-07:00

Updates & Misunderstandings

~Julie Cameron Gray's interview with me is now available in the current issue of Misunderstandings Magazine

~Three poems forthcoming in "This Magazine"

~Books in Canada reviewed "good meat"

BODIES & APPETITES

a review by Jane Henderson, Books in Canada, March 2007, Volume 36, No. 2

If [Myna] Wallin considers the plastic archetypes of contemporary life,
Dani Couture's first collection Good Meat explores these impulses in 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. .
.Couture speculates on what people are willing to do or have done to
them in order to feel nourished, as in "the chicken carver":

it is art that feeds me
night after night
from her blood-
crusted hand
again and again
she carves out my heart
serves it to me
for twice the asking price.

It is easy to borrow Couture's own words to describe hers: honed,
pared, exactly cut. Her sensory, often simple, language is kept tidy
with meticulous line breaks and punctuation. It's rich with suggestion
and sound play, as in "terminal's" airport scene:

hearts held up by security;
hearts senseless
at horseless carousels
hung up on which black suitcase
looks the most familiar.

The imagery is almost invariably tactile, drawn from "the religion of
small things," as in the racoons' "tiny black garbage bag hearts," or
the reflection that "grocery carts / would not make good long boats: /
too many holes." Couture capably compresses characterisation into
physical symbols, as in the conclusion of "Shrimping: a postcard":

. . .he chats with locals.

he, in search of anything. western
hunger waning into a simple desire—

the capture of a creature
only capable of swimming backwards,

away.

One of Couture's most intriguing accomplishments is how subtly her
tone perpetuates the dualities inherent in her theme. The deceptive
quiet of these poems is constructed with precise language, grounding in
the quotidian, and understated humour. It builds readerly trust. Even
the words look steady and calm, presented entirely in lower case.
Suddenly we discover that Couture has led us quietly into territory
that simultaneously invokes the mystic and the absurd, as in her ode to
e.coli or "fish and chip's" twin voices. Or into the absurd and the
heart-breaking, as in the melon-choly conclusion to "anniversary
recipe" which instructs, charmingly, how to make a honeydew hat.
Indeed, Couture presents frankly gruesome subjects, like a child's
dive into shallow water, with convincing ease and without gore. By the
time we've truly grasped the child's situation, the conventional
implications have already been disabled. Instead, we become persuaded
that children, "sweet rag dolls of flesh and mistake, / [were] not
intended to remain cradled / in the uniforms they were / born into."
rather, they must "swim into deeper water / disappear into silt."
In that situation, tender language and the child-fish conflation keep
the reader safe. In "sweet meat," on the other hand, Couture uses
humour to entice the reader into a differently sickening scene:

sugar-coated pork chops
could never look as sweet
as you in a state
of late monday undress
my eyes
the eyes of a butcher
seeing dollar signs
at every blooming curve.

Couture experiments with closed form in her ghazal, "the ends." The
ghazal, still becoming naturalised (some, please note, would say
bastardised) into English from Indo-Islamic tradition, is a series of
couplets that may be read separately or together. It's conventionally
preoccupied with unrequited or mystic love. "The ends" is a chilly
account of departure, the terminus of a relationship whose nature the
reader can only interpolate from couplets like:

even the ends of sentences cut short. stumble over
implication into the next. i give you winter.

It may or may not have been a love affair. The form suggests it, but
we only know the certainty of the departure and the narrator's single
statement of longing, in the image of "the street with its last breath.
a stop. / a lone sign to make you yield. if only."
Couture's adventurous debut is a rewarding read which re-presents our
daily relationships to bodies and appetites. carnivores and vegetarians
alike can sink their teeth into Good Meat.

2007-04-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

Alcuin Society picks best-looking books of 2006

"The Alcuin Society has announced the winners of its 25th annual Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. The judges (Alan Brownoff (University of Alberta Press, Edmonton), book designer, artist, and teacher; Jan Elsted (Barbarian Press, Mission, BC), letterpress printer and teacher; and Glenn Goluska (Imprimerie Dromadaire, Montreal), book designer, typographer, and letterpress printer) selected 34 winning titles from 252 entries; 96 publishers from 9 provinces participated.

The winning books will be exhibited internationally at the Frankfurt and Leipzig Book Fairs, and, in Canada: in Halifax; Wolfville (NS); Montreal; Ottawa; Toronto; Edmonton; Vancouver; and Victoria (BC).

CHILDREN
First prize: ROBIN MITCHELL [Hundreds and Thousands], designer of When You Were Small by Sara O'Leary (Simply Read Books)
Second prize ANDREE LAUZON, designer of L'Envers de la chanson by Andre Leblanc (Les 400 Coups)
Honourable mentions: KAREN POWERS, designer of Casey at the Bat by Ernest L. Thayer (Kids Can Press); ROBIN MITCHELL [Hundreds and Thousands], designer of One Winter Night by Jennifer Lloyd (Simply Read Books); and ANDREE LAUZON, designer of Philou, architecte et associes by Sophie Gironnay (Les 400 Coups).

LIMITED EDITIONS
First prize: JIM ROBERTS & ROBERT MAJZELS, designer of Apikoros Sleuth by Robert Majzels (Moveable Inc.)
Second prize: DAWNA ROSE & BETSY ROSENWALD, designers of Smoking With My Mother by Dawna Rose (JackPine Press)
Third prize: JASON DEWINETZ, designer of Residual by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Greenboathouse Books)
Honourable mention: LAURENT PINABEL, designer of La Nature humaine en 36 etats by Laurent Pinabel (Les Editions de la nature humaine).

PICTORIAL
First prize: GEORGE VAITKUNAS, designer of B.C. Binning by Abraham J. Rogatnick, Ian M. Thom & Adele Weder (Douglas & McIntyre)
Second prize (tie): TOMASZ WALENTA, designer of L'Ombre du doute by Lino (Les 400 Coups); and JESSICA SULLIVAN, designer of Manawa : Pacific Heartbeat by Nigel Reading & Gary Wyatt (Douglas & McIntyre)
Third prize: PETER COCKING, designer of Arthur Erickson : Critical Works by Nicholas Olsberg & Ricardo L. Castro (Douglas & McIntyre)
Honourable mentions: GEORGE VAITKUNAS, designer of Arctic Spirit by Ingo Hessel (Douglas & McIntyre); and ROBIN MITCHELL [Hundreds and Thousands], designer of SweaterLodge by Christopher MacDonald & Greg Bellerby (Simply Read Books/BlueImprint).

POETRY *
Second prize (tie): TIM INKSTER, designer of The Book of Were by Wayne Clifford (The Porcupine's Quill); and BILL KENNEDY, designer of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists by A. Rawlings (Coach House Books)
Third prize (tie): ANDREW STEEVES, designer of Fathom by Tim Bowling (Gaspereau Press Limited); and ANNE-MAUDE THEBERGE, designer of L'Oiseau, le vieux-port et le charpentier by Michel van Schendel (L'Hexagone)
Honourable mention: ZAB DESIGN & TYPOGRAPHY, designer of Good Meat by Dani Couture (Pedlar Press).

PROSE FICTION *
First prize JESSICA SULLIVAN, designer of A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche, translated by Wayne Grady (Douglas & McIntyre)
Third prize: KAREN KLASSEN [cover] & HEIMAT HOUSE [interior], designers of Sugar Bush by Jenn Farrell (Anvil Press)
Honourable mention: CS RICHARDSON, designer of Fabrizio's Return by Mark Frutkin (Knopf Canada).

PROSE NON-FICTION *
First prize: ANDREW STEEVES & ROBERT BRINGHURST, designers of The Tree of Meaning by Robert Bringhurst (Gaspereau Press Limited).

PROSE NON-FICTION ILLUSTRATED
First prize: PETER COCKING & NAOMI MACDOUGALL, designers of Saltwater City by Paul Yee (Douglas & McIntyre)
Second prize: ROXANA ZEGAN, designer of Mars et Avril, t.II by Martin Villeneuve (Les Editions de la Pasteque & Diesel)
Third prize: NAOMI MACDOUGALL & PETER COCKING, designers of A Canadian Saturday Night by Andrew Podnieks (Greystone Books)
Honourable mentions: ROBERTO DOSIL, designer of A Road for Canada by Daniel Francis (Stanton Atkins & Dosil); GEORGE VAITKUNAS, designer of Unsettling Encounters, by Gerta Moray (UBC Press); and ELISA GUTIERREZ, designer of Towards an Ethical Architecture by Alberto Perez-Gomez, Christopher Grabowski, Helena Grdadolnik, Jim Green & May So (Simply Read Books/BlueImprint).

REFERENCE
First prize: NAOMI MACDOUGALL & PETER COCKING, designers of Vij's : Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine by Vikram Vij & Meeru Dhalwala (Douglas & McIntyre)
Second prize: SHARON KISH, designer of Piano, Piano, Pieno by Susan McKenna Grant (HarperCollins)
Third prize: INGRID PAULSON, designer of Faces on Places by Terry Murray (House of Anansi Press)
Honourable mention: JESSICA SULLIVAN & PETER COCKING, designers of Hiking the West Coast of Trail by Tim Leadem (Greystone Books).

* Some prizes not awarded in these categories.

The Alcuin Society (http://www.alcuinsociety.com) is a Vancouver based non-profit society for the support and appreciation of fine books. In addition to the annual Book Design Competition, the Society publishes a quarterly journal, Amphora, and organizes lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and field visits on various aspects of the book."

Article from: http://blogs.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/publishing

2007-03-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

a squirrel is born:

find out more at www.patchysquirrel.ca.

2007-02-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

a new review of 'good meat' is on the danforth review. and just to be clear, i am no longer the managing editor of tdr. i had no idea--until a few days ago-- that a review was in the works. 10-7.

2006-09-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

:::READINGS:::

:::dead poets society night IV:::

tuesday, december 12, 2006
the victory cafe, toronto, ontario
8pm

confirmed readers & corresponding dead poets:

allan briesmaster / basil bunting; ian burgham / ian crichton smith; dani couture / john berryman; gypsy eyes / tba; rudyard; fearon / claude mckay; maureen scott harris / robert creeley; amanda hiebert / tba; bill howell /john newlove; pierre l'abbé /benjamin fondane; carol malyon / bronwen wallace; david mcfadden / shakespeare; john reibetanz / wallace stevens; jacob scheier / frank o'hara; halli villegas / tba

host: david clink

:::windsor launch:::

thursday, october 26, 2006
pause cafe, 74 chatham street west, windsor
7:30pm

:::toronto launch:::

sunday, october, 29, 2006
gladstone hotel art bar, 1214 queen street west, toronto
5-7pm

dani couture launches good meat at hotel canzine 2006

pages books & magazines, broken pencil magazine, pedlar press the gladstone hotel and NOW present a special canzine edition of this is not a reading series: dani couture launches good meat (Pedlar Press) during canzine, broken pencil magazine's annual zine fair and festival of alternative culture. join couture as well as several other food obsessed zinesters for interactive cooking lessons, zinester munchies, and more!

canzine is an annual one-day festival where over 150 exhibitors from across canada gather to exhibit their zines, comics, books, and various self-publishing projects. the audience, over 2000 strong, gets a chance to meet canada's best young thinkers, writers and artists and drool over their wares. at the same time, there are seminars, panel discussions, readings, film screenings, art displays, and other happenings that highlight alternative culture in canada.

the devil and dani make phyllo dough ghosts at the toronto launch of "good meat".

:::reading at toronto small press fair:::

saturday, november 11, 2006
the victory cafe, 581 markham street, toronto
6-9pm

featured readers:

mike barnes, a thaw foretold (biblioasis); terry carroll, body contact (the mercury press); dani couture, good meat (pedlar press); sharon harris, avatar (the mercury press); zoe whittall, the emily valentine poems (snare).

host: beth follett

:::reading at i.v. lounge:::

friday, november 24, 2006
i.v. lounge, 326 dundas street west, toronto
8pm

readers:

charles carroll (the architects' anticipation, poems); dani couture (good meat, poems)
steve mcormond (primer on the hereafter, poems);

host: alex boyd