poetry


night flying is now available at independent bookstores,

Alpine Book Peddlers & Amazon.ca

Published Fall 2018 in Calgary from Frontenac House
Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, 2016

“With the rhythm of a musician and the eye of an owl, Laurie Anne Fuhr’s first publication captures the ways of the great Canadian military brat, vanishing points, flights, and gothic perceptions.”

Frontenac House publication announcement, Calgary, 2018

“This lyric collection appreciates the automatic surrealism of everyday life where ‘dads turn into each other / trying to be Eastwood in civvies.’ The weirdness of the diurnal isn’t expressed via whimsy, but is the result of acute perception: “carbon-copy suns sink through identical / stormdoor windows.” The attitude of the persona? She’s a kind of gimlet-eyed ee cummings, chronicling and pinpointing painful absurdities and excruciating pleasures.

George Elliot Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2016-17).

“From the two-line simplicity of ‘prairie cryptic’ to the book’s centrepiece, the sprawling ‘vanishing point’, Laurie Anne Fuhr’s poems celebrate the possibilities of the word, the road, the snow and the sky, and human emotion, moving at the rat-a-tat-tat of a manual typewriter, then pausing for silence before hitting the carriage return lever. There is an infectious energy and wonder here, imbued with the landscapes of the prairie, the Rockies, and the twang of acoustic music.”

Stuart Ross, author of A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent

“Laurie Anne Fuhr has given us poetry that knits together the shreds and displacements of life. The poet is caught in the teeth of the west — it’s contrails and cryptic combines, its army bases and city bars, its winter storms, escaping highways and vanishing points.”

Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene
Frontenac House

poetry bio

Laurie Anne Fuhr’s poetry has been published in anthologies such as Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Mansfield Press 2010), Leonard Cohen: You’re Our Man (Foundation for Public Poetry Montreal, 2009), and in periodicals in Canada and abroad like THIS Magazine, White Wall Review, Carleton Arts Review, Nod Magazine, Go! Magazine (San Francisco), and Journal of Literature & Aesthetics (India). night flying was published in an earlier chapbook form from pooka press, Vancouver, 2009 — thanks Warren Dean Fulton.

She used to live in Germany, Cold Lake, Ottawa, and Winnipeg, but has lived in Calgary since 2004, serving as Managing Editor for filling Station Magazine from 2008-2011 and now as a poetry instructor at the Alexandra Writers Centre Society and host of the Single Onion OPEN MIC.

Alexandra Writers Centre Single Onion Open Mic

music

Love in the Digital Age EP available now!

birdheat ep - Love in the Digital Age

Laurie Anne Fuhr – vocals, bass, and rhythm guitar
James Dangerous – guitar
Joel Nye – drums
Chris Dadge – drums (Already Highway)
Todd Maduke – mandolin
Paul Hamilton ‘The Deuce’ – harmonica
Aleksandra Danicic – violin

Lorrie Matheson – producer / engineer, Arch Audio (Calgary)

Kenzie Housego – cover artist, mixed-media collage entitled Polka Dots and Debutants.

The lyrics of Strindberg’s Requiem are lines from The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg) by Natalee Caple (ecw press, 2010). Used with permission of the author and publisher.

music bio

Laurie plays solo, and as a duo with Craig Galambos called Bluebird Telegraph, and as a band under the name birdheat. Love in the Digital Age, her first birdheat EP available exclusively on bandcamp, produced by Lorrie Matheson, was released promotionally in 2017 to a selection of campus radio stations, hitting the charts of several of them. Two of her original songs were in the semi-finals of the Calgary Folk Music Festival in 2010 and 2011, and another was a semi-finalist in the South Country Fair Songwriting Contest, 2015. For two years, she ran the Acoustic Open Mic at Cafe Blanca and hosted Songwriting Saturdays. She has been featured at The Listening Room, the Home Series at Good Earth on 11th St SW, Soul in a Bowl at Cornerstone Music Cafe, the Music Mile official launch at Gravity Cafe, and many more events.

The band she plays upright bass and sings backups in, also with Craig Galambos on lead guitar, is Total Gadjos, the seven-piece Calgary-based Eastern-European folk / post-punk band (other members are Lonnie James – drums, Eugene Kirton – sax, Joseph Fernando – accordion, Colleen Buckley – trumpet) headed by Pet’o Joch. Laurie also plays and sings with folk singer-songwriter Joanna Drummond.

Other acts she has has the pleasure of playing with include Tom Phillips, Nico Brennan, Trevor Alguire, Yves & The Talent, Shona Rae & The VooDoo Hand, The Nova Scotiables, Prairie’s Edge, Mercury Audio, Night Committee, Pine Tarts, lonely hunters, and more.

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