Tour gin

For Ariel Gordon, the "Newborns and Nightowls" tour in support of The Navel Gaze, her new chapbook from Palimpsest, was a way to get to know her own book better. "I read it out loud every day in the car," she says, over a lousy gin and tonic in south Regina. Here she casts a sly glance in the direction of her tour-mate, Kerry Ryan, who's been launching The Sleep Life, poems from Muses' Company.

Gordon's poems track a pregnancy, pre-conception to afterbirth. Longish down and across the page, they've continued to push, so to speak, into Gordon's present work. "I'm still going on the pregnancy/childbirth poems," she says.

After the back-and-forth with Ryan during their reading at Luther the other night, Gordon noted "We could go endlessly back and forth with sleeping and birds". That seems about right--sleeping and birds--as the two Winnipeg poets drive north through autumn to Prince Albert for the last stop on their tour, Gordon's Gaze once more sounding from within.