Curated by: Mark Truscott

26 April 2006

Curated by Mark Truscott

Wednesday, April 26, 7:30PM, at Mercer Union

Admission: PWYC ($5 recommended, all of which benefits the readers)

Each monthly installment of Test features two poets, each of whom reads for 30 to 40 minutes. The readings are followed by a brief question and answer period.

Margaret Christakos lives in Toronto. Her poetry collections are Sooner (Coach House, 2005), Excessive Love Prostheses (Coach House, 2002) which won the ReLit Award, Wipe Under A Love (Mansfield, 2000), The Moment Coming (ECW Press, 1998), Other Words for Grace (Mercury, 1994) and Not Egypt (Coach House, 1989). Her novel Charisma (Pedlar Press, 2000) was shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Award. In 2004-5 she held a Canada Council Writer’s residency at the University of Windsor. A new chapbook, Adult Video, is forthcoming from Nomados Editions. In her recent collection, Sooner, a wide range of short poetic fragments and longer, narrative poems negotiate the sonars of expectation, desire, arousal, sequentiality and perception.

Margaret Christakos’ reading is made possible with the generous support of the Toronto Arts Council and the League of Canadian Poets.

Brian Joseph Davis is creator of deceptive sound and print projects. He was called a ‘genius’ by Alex Ross of The New Yorker, for turning the writings of philosopher Theodor Adorno into a punk 7-inch. Frieze Magazine also deemed the same project ‘serious hilarity…joyous and thoughtful.’ Coach House Books recently published Portable Altamont, his first collection of writings, which has garnered praise from Spin Magazine for its ‘elegant, wise-ass rush of truth [and] hiding riotous social commentary in slanderous jokes.’ He’s a regular columnist for Eye Weekly and recently wrote about the death of the cassette for the Utne Reader. Davis has often opened up the authorship of his projects to subversive collaborations. For Thriller, he worked with Michael Jackson fans to create better pro-Jackson propaganda and for Voice Over, he composed a narrative text from a list of 5,000 film taglines, which was then read by professional film trailer voiceover artist Scott Taylor.

Upcoming Test Readers
May 24th: Stephen Cain and Lisa Robertson

Please visit www.testreading.org for author biographies, updates and details. Most readings will be recorded, and sound files will be posted on www.testreading.org, which will also feature contextual documentation for each reader.