To celebrate Poetry Month, I’m a featured poet, along with Terry Carter, of the Planet Earth Reading Series this Friday April 20, 2018 at 7:30 pm at Hillside Coffee and Tea (103-1633 Hillside Avenue, Victoria, across from Hillside Mall). Earlier that afternoon, on Friday April 20, at 1:30 pm, I’m reading at James Bay New Horizons, 234  Menzies Street.

​And on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, at 12:30, I'm reading at Centennial Square in Victoria as part of Poems for the Planet.

TRAILER PARK ELEGY LONG-LISTED FOR MAJOR CANADIAN PRIZE!
SHORT LIST announced April 30––keep your fingers crossed!

League of Canadian Poets for details.  Congratulations to my fellow poets, especially those I've read with recently.

​THREE NEW BOOK REVIEWS

A Brotherly Love Revisited, The Ormsby Review, Reviewed by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes   https://bcbooklook.com/2018/02/01/a-brotherly-love-revisited/

Review: Trailer Park Elegy, League of Canadian Poets, Reviewed by Vanessa
Shield,  http://poets.ca/2018/02/07/review-trailer-park-elegy-by-cornelia-hoogland/

Review of Trailer Park Elegy, Quill &Quire, January 25, 2018, reviewed by Micheline Maylor,  
https://quillandquire.com/review/trailer-park-elegy/

UPCOMING READINGS

Friday April 20, 2018 at 1:30 pm – 
New Horizons Reading, host Sheila Martindale
234  Menzies Street, Victoria, B.C. 

Friday April 20, 2018 at 7:30 pm –
 Planet Earth Reading Series, Victoria, host Daniel Scott
Hillside Coffee and Tea (103-1633 Hillside Avenue, Victoria, across from Hillside Mall). 
​
Sunday, April 22, 12:30
Centennial Square in Victoria, host Victoria Poet Laureate Yvonne Blomer
​as part of Poems for the Planet.

Sunday May 6, 2018 from 1 - 4 p.m. 
​McLoughlin Gardens, 814 Tasman Road, Merville, BC 
for directions: https://www.mcloughlingardens.org/contact/

For past readings go to Events
 

Delighted that TRAILER PARK ELEGY is included in the Longlist for the George Ryga Award, awarded annually to a B.C. writer who has achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness in a new book. Congratulations to the other books on the list, including Refugium (Yvonne Blomer, ed). Thanks also to the judges, and George Ryga. I had a writing retreat in the Ryga House in Summerland a few years ago. I'm honoured. 

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Touring in Toronto: enjoyed reading from TRAILER PARK ELEGY, also the city, the people, my hosts, and the food. OMG. The Grasshopper on College--the seitan dish is amazing. Thanks to The Art Bar, Knife Fork Book, and The Common Reading. 

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Well, that was very fun. Thanks to all who helped make TRAILER PARK ELEGY'S shortlist position on the CBC Poetry Prize so exciting.  

Section 3 of Tourists, on location

Text version of Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway.

FIVE SHORTLISTED POETS

Cornelia Hoogland
Laboni Islam 
Sarah Kabamba
Alessandra Naccarato
Harold Rhenisch

Hear complete Poem

Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway makes CBC longlist!
Short list announced Wednesday, November 15th! ​

Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway (the first of four sections)
1.
The double-decker. The preserved,
random address book:
Tiffany, Jasmine, Jill, Crystal, Kelly, Warren.
Clouds the colour of tea, afternoon,
the Inner harbour. Journal and English schoolgirl
Nivea cream in her backpack.
She was finding her voice like the social worker said.
She hadn't written a word. Was found   
inscribed on Portage Inlet, Craigflower Bridge,
the last overpass before the cigarette
stubbed into her forehead. Call it Bindi,
her mother said, but black. There were
Greyhound busses rolling past the Empress,
girls gliding through the school halls
on platform heels, saying No you're not.

I’m thrilled Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway is one of 33 long-listed poems (selected from more than 2,400 English-language submissions) for the CBC Poetry Prize. Four finalists will be announced on November 15, 2017. “Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway” is a long poem, 20 years in the making. These poems are based on the newspaper clippings my Mother sent to me about Reena Virk's murder in Victoria's Gorge waterway, as well as my research and other books such as Heather Spear’s “Required Reading.”I still have the now-yellow newspaper articles.

Inspiration behind the Poem

Trailer Park Elegy Launched!

Cornelia Hoogland’s tightly scored long poem explores the thin membrane between the living and the dead.   

In response to her brother’s sudden death, Cornelia Hoogland explores the shift in gravity his dramatic absence creates. Set on the Salish sea on Vancouver Island’s east coast, Trailer Park Elegy reaches back two thousand years to the First Peoples, as well as to the brother whose delight was summers spent at Deep Bay.

Hoogland looks to her child-experiences of death, as well as to literature, chaos theory, dark matter, geological time, and the effect of noise pollution on whales. She turns grief round and round, enlarges it, pushes beyond received ideas of closure and grief’s stages. Death is not only part of life, the dead assign their unfinished work to the living. But the responsibility for connection belongs as much to the dead as to the living.
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The book’s form, a long poem, provides thematic coherence for the multiple contingencies that disturb the narrator’s present. Like keeping balls up in the air, Hoogland expertly catches and tosses, thus sustaining her imaginative energies throughout the book. Through spare, never-sentimental language, Hoogland’s lyric resources are adequate to human loss and suffering. “I see reflected in my daughters’ faces / the story my brother animates. / He opens his hands, / shapes a funnel his life / pours through.”

Publications