Three Black Scribes (+ One) @ Free Times Cafe

Three Black Scribes Speakin’ the Livin’ Truth!

AN EVENING OF READINGS: presented by EXILE EDITIONS and ART BAR

BIG SAVINGS: Show a UofT Student Card – or a Senior Card – at the books table: any/all books just $10! Or, even better: 3 books $25… or, 10 for $50!

Monday, February 13, 2023 at FREE TIMES CAFE (Toronto)
320 College Street • 2 blocks west of Spadina Avenue

Richard Atkinson: Life Crimes and Hard Times – A Memoir.
George Elliott Clarke: J’Accuse…! Poem Versus Silence – A Manifesto.
Michael Fraser: EXILE Quarterly – a suite from his forthcoming Poetry Book.
• Our special Art Bar guest joins us from Portugal:
David Swartz: ORPHEU Quarterly – his Translations of the Original Texts.

FREE Admission
$10 Donation to Art Bar appreciated

Start 7:00 p.m.
or come earlier to enjoy a bite and drink and friendly conversation…

The evening’s featured Books and Magazines:

The Life Crimes and Hard Times of Ricky Atkinson: Leader of the Dirty Tricks Gang – A True Story, by Richard Atkinson / with Joe Fiorito

6 x 9 PB • 366 pages (8 pages of colour photos) • 978-1-55096-674-9 • $28.95

To order: www.exileeditions.com/shop/the-life-crimes-and-hard-times-of-ricky-atkinson

Life Crimes and Hard Times is a breathtakingly scandalous story, and a tale of redemption after having been drawn into a life of crime, that is the sober memoir which provides a solid understanding of how crime is situated in structural, cultural, historical, and situational contexts.

This is the life story of Ricky Atkinson, leader of the Dirty Tricks Gang, who grew up fast and hard in one of Toronto’s toughest neighbourhoods during the social ferment of the Sixties, during the fledgling Black Power Movement in Canada. His life was made all the more difficult coming from a black, white and aboriginal mixed family. Under his leadership, the gang eventually robbed more banks and pulled off so many jobs that it is unrivalled in Canadian history. Follow him from the mean streets to backroom plotting, to jail and back again, as he learns the hard lessons of leadership, courage and betrayal.

Today, after reconciling his past and life, he works to educate youth and people from all backgrounds about the no-win choice of being a criminal.

EXILE Quarterly: 45.4 – and – With My Eyes Wide Open, by Michael Fraser

EXILE: 8 x 10 colour magazine, 96 pages, no advertising/all content! (Fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama, visual arts of all kinds, and so much more… celebrating 50 years!)

The Book: 5 x 7.5  PB  • 72 pages • 978-1-990773-06-8 • $19.95 (Release date, with Exile Editions: June 2023)

To order EXILE Quarterly 45.4: www.exilequarterly.com/product/volume-45-4

To see what EXILE Quarterly is all about (also celebrating 50 years of great publishing, with o=ver 3,000 contributions in 2022/2023) : https://www.exilequarterly.com

• Pre-order link to Michael Fraser’s forthcoming book: please check back in a day or two.

These poems that stand fiercely on their own as poems; they are the bold hammering of stresses; they are tight and clear and clean: a suite is featured as an excerpt appearing in EXILE Quarterly, Volume 45 Number 4.   

With My Eyes Wide Open (poetry collection release date: June 2023) navigates life’s catastrophes, failures, and coming through experiential slaughter revived and reborn to new possibilities.  The biographical themes of grief, family, and resiliency amid the backdrop of racism and near poverty are explored with earnestness and no filter. This is confessional poetry where the poet acknowledges his wanton decisions with deft poetic skill, astute creativity, and imaginative flair. This is not a book of victimhood, but one of triumph!

Michael Fraser is published in various national and international journals and anthologies. He is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018, and has won numerous awards, including the 2005 Toronto Star Poetry Competition, Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2018 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award, and the 2022 Lesley Strutt Poetry Prize sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. Previous collections include the chapbook Breaking the Underground (Thirteenth Tiger Press 2003), and books To Greet Yourself Arriving (Tightrope Books 2016) and The Day-Breakers (Biblioasis 2022). With My Eyes Wide Open is his fourth poetry collection. He lives in Toronto.

J’ACCUSE…! (Poem Versus Silence), by George Elliott Clarke

6 x 9  PB, with French Flaps • 208 pages • 978-1-55096-953-5 • $26.95    

To order: www.exileeditions.com/shop/jaccuse-poem-versus-silence

In a time of malevolent righteousness, often described as Cancel Culture, J’Accuse…! is an essay-in-poetry by Canada’s Parliamentarian Poet Laureate emeritus that responds to the impacts of being “cancelled.”

Shame is not a word that gets much play these days among the caustically righteous, but Clarke has been wronged, and the people who did the wronging should be ashamed of themselves.
    J’Accuse…! is a poignant statement that calls upon intellectuals and radicals to never submit to impulses that intentionally, or even unintentionally, forbid debate and questioning.
    J’Accuse…! ponders what is truly unspeakable: injustice.
    Clarke boldly confronts the reality that, in our turbulent time, there must be an interest in real voices and stories, otherwise any individual can fall victim to silencing – blacklisting – gag-orders – cancelling… And unflinchingly, this cri-de-coeur reveals the personal cost – borne by all poets who seek to “bear witness to Treasure – / despite all opposing Battery.”

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, has served as the fourth Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15), the seventh Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has also taught at Duke and Harvard. He has published over 20 books of poetry, four plays, two novels, and has won numerous awards.  He lives in Toronto.

David Swartz
a special guest from Portugal, presenting his translations of
ORPHEU Quarterly, Volumes 1 & 2

“Properly speaking, ORPHEU is an exile of artistic temperaments seeking art as secrecy or torment… Our intent is to materialize, as a group or idea, a determined number of revelations in thought or art, that, based on this aristocratic principle, find in ORPHEU, their esoteric ideal, ingrained in the way we feel and know ourselves.” — Luis De Montalvo, Lisboa, Portugal 1915

​Orpheu – Revista Trimestral de Literatura was published in 1915. The project was to be a quarterly magazine, the first issue corresponding to the months of January to March and the second from April to June. A third, of which proofs remain, due to lack of money to print, was never completed or launched.

About the Translator: Originally from Toronto, David Swartz has resided in Lisbon, Portugal since 2013, where he teaches English at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Some of David´s recent translations include Nuno Júdice’s “An essay on inspiration” (Berkeley Poetry Review, Issue 46, 2016), And Painting? Questioning Contemporary Painting, (CIEBA-FBAUL, 2016), and Matteo Lost His Job, by Gonçalo M. Tavares (Absinthe 21: 2015). He translated and published The Religious Mantle by Nuno Júdice in 2019.

WOULD YOU LIKE MORE INFORMATION?

Email us at: info@exileeditions.com

or

Websites: www.ExileEditions.com and www.ExileQuarterly.com

Exile gratefully acknowledges the financial contributions from the Government of Canada’s Special Measures to Support Journalism component of the Canada Periodical Fund, and the Canada Book Fund, as well as the Canada Council for the Arts toward our December 2022 through March 31 2023 author & book events.

Exile’s $15,000 Short Fiction competition, and $3,000 Poetry Competition, will have info & links posted by the end of day, Thursday, February 2, 2023.