Canadian Poetry; Wet Ink Books; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.WetInkBooks.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef
 

 

Donna Langevin

 

 
Canadian Poetry; Hidden Brook Press; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.hiddenbrookpress.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef
 

 

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Poet/playwright Donna Langevin is a retired ESL teacher and the mother of three sons. The latest of her five poetry collections include Timed Radiance, Aeolus House 2022 and Brimming, Piquant Press 2019. Appearing in journals in Canada, Israel, Australia, India and the USA, she won second prize in the 2014 GritLIT contest, first prize in the Banister Anthology Competition 2019, and first place in the Ontario Poetry Society Pandemic Poem contest, 2020. Her plays The Dinner and Bargains in the New World won first prizes for script at the Eden Mills Festival in 2014 and 2015. If Socrates Were in My Shoes was produced at the Toronto Alumnae Theatre NIF Festival in 2018 and Remember Him Chasing Squirrels was performed there in 2020. Winner of a second place Stella Award from Act II Studio, Donna’s play Summer of Saints (about the 1847 typhus epidemic) was produced at the Fresh Picks: Sandra Kerr New Plays Festival in 2022. A memoir/fictoire, A Story for Sadie was published by Piquant Press in 2023.  Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Kate Rogers, was launched in January 2024 by Aeolus House Press.

 

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Donna Langevin’s House of Poems is more a vast estate than a single cottage, and her poetry easily moves in and out of both.  Art works on the wall, the inner city at her door. She populates the house with Susanna Moodie, the face of urban homelessness, neighbours who engender a “murderous wish/black as the moon’s dark side” and the drama of families and friends in rooms full of memories. Her imagination, like her language, is rooted in the everyday, and the minutiae of human experience that drives it gives these poems “new lenses” for the miracle of memory she conjures. Her poems are, indeed, “hymns to the heavens,” studded with Langevin’s unique constellation of imagery and diction.

   —Antony Di Nardo, author of forget.sadness.grass and Through Yonder Window Breaks

 

Donna Langevin, opens House of Poems with the poignant and compassionate “For My Readers: This book is my ‘Open House’ and invites you, dear reader, to enter.” And what a sojourn, from birth to universe. With vivid, visceral, vibrant, unflinching, honest and empathetic detail, Langevin explores the meaning of Home in homelessness, her body and mortality, love and loss, family, our world, and ever expanding, our universe. Witty and fully engaged, encyclopedic and wise, House of Poems reverberates long after reading the last line, enticing many immersions.

    —Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, author and artist of What A World, Third Prize winner of Golden Grassroots Chapbook Contest.

 

 

In House of Poems Donna Langevin’s insights roam, wild and wise across the long arc of a gifted poet’s life. She makes memory live in her story-telling. In giving us “a poet’s life” of tremendous scope, Langevin speaks of the profound importance of knowing love, learning from one another, and questioning what we once might have believed. Here is a book that has sprung from a powerful imagination, a book built on direct, youthful language. Readers will find, as the poet herself does, that we will all be — in the end — “homesick for this flawed, blessed earth.”

—Chris Pannell, author of Love Despite the Ache, Adventurize Your Summer

Canadian Poetry; Wet Ink Books; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.WetInkBooks.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef