Every year, ten new poems by ten BC poets are selected to join the Poetry in Transit program and ride in the ad space on buses around the province. Each poem is part of a poetry collection published by a Canadian publisher, so, if you catch a glimpse of a poem you love on the bus, just know that there is an entire book of poems where that one came from!
Below, get to know this year’s featured poets and their work. But you’ll have to hop on a bus to find the poems that were selected to accompany riders on their commutes.
This year’s collection will begin appearing on TransLink buses on Saturday, September 28, 2024. We’ll be celebrating with Word Vancouver at UBC Robson Square with a day of poetry readings, prizes, and the opportunity to (literally) hop aboard the poetry bus! We hope to see you there!
About the poet: Michelle Brown’s work has been featured in Maisonneuve, THIS, The Walrus, Malahat Review, Arc, CV2, Grain, Prism, and The Puritan. She has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Award, the Relit Awards, CV2’s Young Buck Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize. Michelle lives in Vancouver, on the unceded lands of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples.
About the poetry: Michelle Brown’s second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada’s catchiest lyric poets.
About the poet: Dina Del Bucchia is the author of the short-story collection Don’t Tell Me What to Do and of three collections of poetry: Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items, and Rom Com, the latter written with Daniel Zomparelli. She is an editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine, the artistic director of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, and a co-host of the podcast Can’t Lit with Jen Sookfong Lee. An otter and dress enthusiast, she lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations (Vancouver, British Columbia).
About the poetry: You’re Gonna Love This tracks the narrator’s entwined relationships with her spouse, her television, and herself. Displaying Del Bucchia’s trademark nuanced media literacy, this distinctly working-class long poem unravels how media culture’s around-the-clock presence impacts our connection to the world. Recapping episodes in her experience of caregiving, she also addresses her own mental-health journey with dark humour, wry cultural references, and a flair for making the deeply personal especially relatable.
About the poet: Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis creative, beadworker and poet born in Win-Nipi (Winnipeg) and has been residing in Secwepemcú’lecw since 2014. They are a Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity alumni. They have been working in the human services field for nearly a decade. Their microchap, TEETH, is available from Ghost City Press. Trailer Park Shakes is their first full length poetry book; it was longlisted for the 2023 First Nations Community READS Award and shortlisted for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Awards.
About the poetry: The poems in Trailer Park Shakes, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice — how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. This is a book that seems to want to hold everything — an entire cross-section of lived experience — written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words’ embrace. Dion-Glowa’s poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic.
About the poet: Svetlana Ischenko is an award-winning poet, translator, former actress and teacher. She was born in Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, where she established herself as a stage actress and poet before immigrating to Canada in 2001. She is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, essays and dramatic plays in Ukrainian and English. In Canada, her most recent book is Nucleus: A Poet’s Lyrical Journey from Ukraine to Canada (Ronsdale Press) and her poems have been published in The Antigonish Review and Event and were included in the anthology Che Wach Choe/Let the Delirium Begin (Leaf Press) and the chapbook In the Mornings I Find a Crane’s Feathers in my Damp Braids (Leaf Press). She lives with her family in North Vancouver, BC.
About the poetry: In Nucleus, readers see through a Ukrainian immigrant’s eyes as she looks back at the land and traditions of her original country. Nucleus illuminates Ischenko’s poetic transformation from a heroic crown of sonnets to freer, lyrical pieces, all within the dynamic of Ukrainian and Canadian subject matter and sensibilities. A powerful collection, made even more profound in light of recent events in Ukraine.
About the poet: Donna Kane is the recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture, and the British Columbia Medal of Good Citizenship. Her poems, short fiction, reviews and essays have been published widely. She is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse (2018), and of three books of poetry—most recently Orrery, a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. She divides her time between Rolla, BC, and Halifax, NS.
About the poetry: Reflecting on subjects ranging from Comet NEOWISE to swallowtail butterflies to The Incredible Hulk, Asterisms is a thought-provoking follow up to her last collection, Orrery. Diverse in tone and subject matter, mixing humour and wonder, the poems in Asterisms take readers on a soul-stirring journey through the expansiveness of space and the interconnectedness of all life on earth.
About the poet: Christopher Levenson is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Moorings (Caitlin Press, 2023), and three chapbooks. He was the co-founder and first editor of Arc magazine. His collection Night Vision was short-listed for the Governor General’s award in 2014. Levenson reviews poetry for the BC Review, and lives in Vancouver, BC.
About the poetry: Moorings, the fourteenth collection from award-winning poet Christopher Levenson, is a profound meditation on loss and aging. Moving from memories of childhood and artistic tributes to frustrated critiques of capitalism balanced with doses of lighthearted wordplay, these poems celebrate the colour of life, yet are wary of the darkness that can be found inside and around us. Pulling from a wide range of experience and memories but always anchored in the particular and the familiar, the poems in Moorings confront aging and death head-on, while also celebrating the spiritual sustenance of friendship and memories in our steadily changing world.
About the poet: Bradley Peters is a poet, actor, and carpenter from Mission, BC. His poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines, has been shortlisted for The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Award, has twice been the runner-up for Subterrain‘s Lush Triumphant Award, and in 2019 placed first in Grain Magazine‘s Short Grain contest. Sonnets from a Cell is his first book; it was winner of the 2024 Raymond Souster Award and the 2023 Alcuin Award, and was longlisted for the 2024 Gerald Lampert Award.
About the poetry: Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.
About the poet: Michelle Poirier Brown is an internationally published poet and performer living on unceded syilx territory in Vernon, BC. She is nêhiyaw-iskwêw and a citizen of the Métis Nation. Retired from careers as a speech writer, conflict analyst, and federal treaty negotiator, she now writes full-time and has taken up birdwatching.
About the poetry: You Might Be Sorry You Read This is a stunning debut, revealing how breaking silences and reconciling identity can refine anger into something both useful and beautiful. A poetic memoir that looks unflinchingly at childhood trauma (both incestuous rape and surviving exposure in extreme cold), it also tells the story of coming to terms with a hidden Indigenous identity when the poet discovered her Métis heritage at age 38. The confessional poems are polished yet unpretentious, often edgy but humorous; they explore trauma yet prioritize the poet’s story. There is a lifetime in these poems.
About the poet: Andrea Scott is a mother, writer and teacher living in Victoria, B.C., the traditional territory of the Lekwungen Peoples. Publications include The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, Geist, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and The Antigonish Review. She was longlisted for the 2023 Room Poetry Contest and the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. She won the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the FBCW 2022 Literary Contest and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize.
About the poetry: According to author John Barton, in In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, “Andrea Scott digs into the issues that trouble us today with a humanity free of doom-scrolling self-pity. Her poetic touch is casual but not loose, festooned in specifics yet uncluttered, and driven by a gentle, unshowy humour she hopes is weaned off fossil fuels. She may have “a fishy feeling about the future,” especially the one her children face, yet by the end of In the Warm Shallows of What Remains she finds time to get down on her knees and optimistically put in her garden.”
About the poet: Tiffany Stone is a children’s poet and critically acclaimed picture book author. She lives in BC with her family and several sort-of small (but very super) pets.
About the poetry: In Super Small: Miniature Marvels of the Natural World, acclaimed author Tiffany Stone combines comic panels and poems to share incredible facts about our world’s miniature marvels, while illustrator Ashley Spires’ zany cartoon-style illustrations make these itty-bitty superheroes (and supervillains) pop from the page. From glow-in-the-dark sharks to immortal jellyfish and tiny cats with lethal aim, Super Small shows readers that just because you are small, it doesn’t mean you aren’t super—and sometimes being small can be super in and of itself.