Calgary’s 2014-16 Poet Laureate, Derek Beaulieu is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of conceptual fiction and over 175 chapbooks. Beaulieu is an award-winning instructor of Creative Writing, Theory and Contemporary Canadian Literature at the Alberta College of Art + Design. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University. His work is consistently praised as some of the most radical and challenging in contemporary Canadian writing.

Kern

Kern balances on a precipice between the visual and nonsensical, offering poems just out of meaning’s reach. Using dry-transfer lettering, Derek Beaulieu made these concrete pieces by hand, building the images gesturally in response to shapes and patterns in the letters themselves. This is poetry closer to architecture and design than confession, in which letters are released from their usual semantic duties as they slide into unexpected affinities and new patterns. Kern highlights the gaps inside what we see and what we know, filling the familiar with the singular and the just seen with the faintly remembered.

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