RAVEN Chapbooks

12/05/2024

Here are a few more photographs from the Raven Chapbooks November 29th launch of Susan Alexander’s “Berberitzen”, and Lorraine Gane’s “If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb”; …and a few lines from their beautiful poems:

“Because all that was old had burned clean away.
A new world had bloomed from a heart’s last heat,
And where we lie there are lilies, lilies, sweet lilies.
Where we lie fragrant lilies bloom over our feet.”
from “Ballad”, Susan Alexander

“Something calls out
among the tallest firs.
Holy! Holy! Holy!
Each sweep of green is a wide wing,
the towering seraphim waiting to rise.”
from “Sanctus”, Susan Alexander

Questions rise and fall this morning
like your face surfacing in and out of darkness.

And if all your desire went out to the impossibly
beautiful, where is that desire now?

Did you feel a letting go in your last breath,
a slow ebb into the void?

What will fill the absence of you now?
The waves of grief come and go.

A torrent of water rages in the creek,
dark shoulders opening wider and wider.
“Elegy 4”, Lorraine Gane

[books available to purchase directly from the website: RavenChapbooks.ca]

11/30/2024

Raven Chapbooks celebrated this evening with Susan Alexander launching "Berberitzen" and Lorraine Gane launching "If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb" at the Salt Spring Island Public Library. Poems about love, loss, and the journey towards healing.

11/14/2024

The deadline for submitting your poetry manuscript is just over two weeks away: November 30th. The prize is publication for June 2025. Don't miss out on this chance to be published! Check the website for more details and contest guidelines: ravenchapbooks(dot)ca

11/06/2024

Raven Chapbooks will be launching Susan Alexander's "Berberitzen" and Lorraine Gane's "If I Have Known Beauty" at the Salt Spring Island Public Library on Friday, November 29th at 7 pm. Come out and celebrate these two wonderful poets and books with us! Refreshments, book table, fabulous readings.

10/11/2024

I just received the POETRY IN TRANSIT bus card with Andrea Scott's poem "Return to the Lake of Shining Waters" from her RAVEN Chapbooks winning collection (2024) IN THE WARM SHALLOWS OF WHAT REMAINS. We have only a few copies of her chapbook left! Message me if you would like to order a copy.

10/08/2024

Yay Andrea! and all the poets with poems riding the buses!

09/20/2024

A great review in The BC Review by Mary Ann Moore for Susan Alexander's "Berberitzen" and Lorraine Gane's "If I Have Known Beauty". Follow the link here:
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Mary Ann Moore reviews Berberitzen, by Susan Alexander (Salt Spring Island: Raven Chapbooks, 2024) $20.00 / 9781778160363 and If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb, by Lorraine Gane (Salt

09/04/2024

Just in - a lovely endorsement for Susan Alexander's new chapbook:

Susan Alexander’s Berberitzen is the story in poems about love discovered late in life—both its tenderness and its tenuousness. Beginnings and endings are woven together in this brief and artistically-beautiful chapbook. “You were leaving the world when I found you,” writes Alexander, seeing partings as rehearsals and changing seasons as seasons of love. The ordinary takes on new meaning or no meaning as a familiar fir becomes a towering seraphim and daily irritations fall away. Reading these poems, I felt both heartbroken and full-hearted, love and loss utterly inseparable in the telling.

—Laura Apol, Lansing Michigan poet laureate emerita, author of Cauterized (Michigan State University Press, 2024)

You can order Susan's book on the RavenChapbooks.ca website.

09/03/2024

Lorraine Gane's poetry collection, "If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb" is now available for order through the RAVEN Chapbooks website. Official launch will take place this fall.

"Lorraine Gane’s "If I Have Known Beauty" is a brightly-spangled example of the essential conversations poets have with one another through their poetry. It is also a deeply moving tribute to her friend, the poet Phyllis Webb. What will fill the absence, Gane asks, knowing the only true possibility: the space you were / grows larger. These poems glide into that widening space like a long drawn out note of sweet music. " --Stephen Collis, author of “A History of the Theories of Rain” (Talonbooks, 2021)

Cover art: detail from "Peacock Feather Shawl" by Louis C. Tiffany, Metropolitan Museum of Art, wool and silk, a gift to Lorraine from Phyllis. Book design: Sarah J Clark

09/03/2024

So happy for Marlene Grand Maitre that her poetry chapbook, WILD KIN, was a finalist for the Sunshine Coast Writers & Editors Poetry Award! Although they don't have a category for poetry chapbooks, they were so impressed with Marlene's poetry that they included her as honourable mention. So pleased for her! 🙌

08/30/2024

A short video clip from an interview with Sunshine Coast Art & Words Festival creator extraordinaire, Cathalynn Labonte-Smith where I talked about the annual Raven Chapbooks poetry contest.

08/30/2024

A short video clip where Cathalynn Labonte-Smith, creator of the Sunshine Coast Art & Words Festival, interviewed me about the Raven Chapbooks annual poetry contest.

08/30/2024

Our INDIGO SERIES chapbooks for 2024 are now available for order: Susan Alexander's "Berberitzen" and Lorraine Gane's "If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb". Both books were designed by Sarah Clark and are hand sewn and published in a signed limited edition of 125. We will be launching both chapbooks here on Salt Spring Island, Saturday Nov. 30th, with readings (in person) by the poets.

SUSAN ALEXANDER'S "Berberitzen" is a masterful braiding of language and image that leaves a bodily impact; these pages are filled with a scent and taste of desire. Poems to her beloved, "He filled the horizon/ when he wasn't there" trace "the night's hard slap" as diagnosis becomes reality. One can only hope that this holy love story will fill her days and nights as "Pollen on salal/ each leaf vein etched/ with gold dust..."
Terry Ann Carter, author of Tokaido (Red Moon Press, 2017)

LORRAINE GANE'S beautifully designed chapbook charts the poet’s journey through the loss of her beloved mentor and friend, Phyllis Webb. Each poem is a step through the Bardo of her own grief. Ganes’ poems, plain-spoken and lyrical, are as delicately woven as Webb’s treasured gift of a peacock scarf. Ghazal-like couplets “leap” from her original shock and anguish, as “waves of grief come and go,” echoing the Bardo’s passage from death to rebirth, and final acceptance of What Is.”

Wendy Donawa, author of “Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions” (Frontenac House, 2022)

08/18/2024

Calling all poets living in B.C.!
The 2025 RAVEN CHAPBOOKS POETRY CONTEST opens September 1st for submissions from emerging and published poets residing in B.C. Don't miss the opportunity to win this exciting poetry award:- the winning manuscript will be published in June 2025. This year's judges are John Barton and Arleen Pare. Visit the website for details and contest guidelines: ravenchapbooks(dot)ca Deadline for submission is November 30, 2024. Spread the word! Share the post!

08/01/2024

Andrea Scott's official Salt Spring Island book launch (June 22nd at the Salt Spring Island Public Library) was included in the Gulf Islands Driftwood "A Day in the Life of Salt Spring Island". Photo of Andrea reading from her book "In The Warm Shallows of What Remains" by Avril Kirby.

08/01/2024

Exciting news today that poet ANDREA SCOTT is one of ten poets picked for the 2024 Poetry in Transit program. Congratulations Andrea!

Visit the official site for more information:
https://www.readlocalbc.ca/resources/poetry-in-transit/

07/28/2024

What a wonderful book launch for Andrea Scott, celebrating her Raven Chapbooks, "In The Warm Shallows of What Remains", held at Fort Tectoria in Victoria. She was joined by three other fabulous Victoria poets: Carmen Morgan who was also MC for the evening, Julie Paul and Catherine St. Denis. There was a standing room only crowd and great refreshments were available from the cafe by Ceri Barlow. We even had a quartet of Raven poets in attendance: Zoe Dickinson, Marlene Grand Maitre, Ian Thomas, and our guest of honour, Andrea. Bravo Poets and congratulations to Andrea. You gave an awesome reading.

07/13/2024

What a lovely afternoon I had yesterday visiting with poet Susan Alexander here on Salt Spring Island while she signed her newly released RAVEN Chapbooks, "Berberitzen", a beautifully crafted elegiac sequence of poems in an elegantly designed and hand-stitched book. Many thanks to Sarah J Clark who worked with me and designed the book. From her Endnotes, Susan writes, "The title Berberitzen (barberries) comes from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke from "A Book for the Hours of Prayer"... This poem has haunted me from the first time I read it. It carries a warning to pay attention and to find the authentic self while there is time."

You can order a copy of Susan's book by sending a message with your address to: [email protected] (Soon the website will include an ordering page.)