Jane Munro is a Canadian poet, writer and educator.
Jane Munro’s newest book is Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). Her sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Active Pass (Pedlar Press), Point No Point (McCLelland & Stewart) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books).
Blue Sonoma
Jane Munro won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2015
As if “a voice spoke her name and woke her,” Jane Munro’s new poems are openhearted, yet quick and taut, with a playful – even biting – wit. How can Blue Sonoma be so elegant, so apparently simple, when each poem is a tinderbox?
— Anne Simpson on Blue Sonoma
Glass FLoat
What contracts and what expands in grief and where does one go when there is no escape from the self?
…. Glass Float is an ocean of insight bombs.
Micheline Maylor on Glass Float
More About Glass Float
Review of Glass Float by Marguerite Pigeon in League of Canadian Poets
Munro is back with Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). Her tools are new: narrative and diaristic series interspersed with flashes from the biographical past. But Munro has the same ambition to summon meaning from the jumble of experience.
Review of Glass Float by Kim Fahner in periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics (rob mclennan)
Jane Munro’s Glass Float is a book that almost seems to float easily and beautifully in either air or water, taking readers on a voyage around the world, but also on a journey that leads us more deeply within ourselves as we read through the poems. She sets the tone with her epigraph, using a quotation from David J. Chalmers, who has written: “Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.”
Review of Glass Float by David Starkey, California Review of Books
Glass Float, Jane Munro (Brick) “Art is suggestion,” the poet remembers being told by her grandfather, “art is not representation.” That distinction holds true throughout Glass Float, and yet Munro is fiendishly good at describing things, in particular a yoga retreat in India not long after the death of her husband. The book ranges from prose poem sequences to the cryptic and beautiful lyrics for which she is best known. Always, though, Munro’s poems enact the advice of one of her yoga teachers: “Shine like a full moon without dispelling the dark.”
Featured in FreeFall Review
ONLINE Publications
Jane reads her poem “Break the Fear” from Glass Float.
Jane, a dedicated yogi and noted poet, was inspired by her studies in Pune. Listen below as she shares some of her reflections with us…
“Receive Your Face” from Glass Float.
"Receive Your Face" published in Inyengar Yoga Newsletter Winter Spring 2021
https://iyengaryogacentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Yoga-News-Winter-Spring-2021-final.pdf
RECENT events
Brick Book Book Club
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
London (ON) Word Fest - Jane Munro & Penn Kemp in Conversation
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Watch the zoom video here:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=816107712501675&ref=watch_permalink
Lunch Poems at SFU presents Sonnet L'Abbé and Jane Munro
September 16, 2020
A Brick Books package deal - Glass Float and Blue Sonoma for only 30$
Victoria Festival of Authors Poetry Podcast
September 30, 2020
Jane Munro reads from Glass Float at the Art Bar Poetry Series.
June 2020
Victoria Festival of Authors
July 2020
Jane is interviewed by Susan Braley, a Victoria poet.
https://victoriafestivalofauthors.ca/2020/07/16/qa-with-jane-munro/
Glass Float Virtual Book Launch by
Brick Books & Massy Books
April 23, 2020
Link to watch Jane's reading on YouTube
Glass Float
jane munro
Jane Munro is a Canadian poet, writer and educator.
Jane Munro’s newest book is Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). Her sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Active Pass (Pedlar Press), Point No Point (McCLelland & Stewart) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books).
She is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs (Mary di Michele, Jan Conn, Susan Gillis, Jane Munro) who have published Whisk (Pedlar Press) and Rhinoceros (Gaspereau).
A Sally Port (Espresso Chapbooks, 2018) – short prose pieces about her childhood – came out in June 2018. These are excerpts from a longer memoir, Open Every Window, forthcoming from Douglas & McIntyre.
As well as working as a writer, Jane has been employed as a professor of Creative Writing at several universities in BC, done educational planning, research and administration, taught many informal writing workshops, and read her poetry to audiences in a wide variety of venues across Canada. She has also given readings in Ireland, the USA, Italy, India and Egypt.
For more than twenty years, she has studied (in Canada and in India) and practiced Iyengar Yoga.
In 2012, she moved back to Vancouver – where she grew up and raised her children – after spending twenty years living at Point No Point in a rural area on the coast of Vancouver Island. Although BC has been her home base, she has lived in the USA and Turkey, traveled extensively in India and in Europe, and been to South Africa and Egypt.
Born (Patricia Jane Southwell) in Chilliwack BC, she was educated at UBC (undergraduate, M.F.A., Ed.D.), Indiana University (B.A.), and SFU (M.A.).
2015 Winners of Griffin Poetry Prize with Scott Griffin
Jane Munro, Canadian Winner; Scott Griffin; Michael Longley, International Winner
photo by Tom Sandler
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