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Three poems by Samiya Bashir
Samiya Bashir, a Portland-based poet who teaches at Reed College, weaves experimental lyrics that combine scientific knowledge (quantum mechanics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics) with an intense investigation into love, identity, and the experience of real, live Black bodies. Cascadia Magazine is honored to publish three poems from her 2017 collection Field Theories.
Accompanying these intricate poems are gorgeous images by Roland Dahwen Wu, who also created a series of video interpretations of Field Theories in collaboration with Bashir.
“Remember love?
How it loosed its jaw to our kisses?
How it unhinged us? How it tried us
like so many keys like so many rusted
locks?…”
Head over to Cascadia Magazine and read the poems here.
BC First Nations plan huge pipeline protest in March
In opposition to KinderMorgan’s planned expansion of the TransMountain pipeline across British Columbia, a coalition of First Nations announced they would organize a large protest at Burnaby Mountain in March. The Tsleil-Waututh First Nation announced the initiative as a “last resort” against the 1,147-kilometer pipeline, which is expected to increase oil tanker traffic in the Salish Sea seven times over.
Will Washington state pass a voting right act?
John Stang at Seattle Globalist reports on a bill in the Washington state legislature that would allow local governments to move from city-wide elections to district-based elections. In places like Yakima, he notes, such a move could significantly increase representation for Latino communities.
Will BC work for social justice in pot legalization?
Travis Lupick, writing for The Georgia Straight, reports on moves by British Columbia lawmakers to forgive past criminal activity when issuing licenses to legal pot retailers. In Seattle, mayor Jenny Durkan announced a plan to allow anyone in the city with a misdemeanor for marijuana to clear that conviction from their record.
Sequencing the genes of redwoods to protect giant trees
A detailed feature in the Washington Post reports on scientists’ efforts to sequence the genetic code of the massive redwoods that grow in northern California and southern Oregon. Biologists hope to gain a better understanding of the biological diversity of the massive trees that now occupy 5 percent of their former range that once spanned from southern California to the Columbia Gorge.
Excavating the painful history of Chinese in the Northwest
City Arts interviews Chinese artist Zhi Lin, whose exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum uncovers the hidden history of discrimination and exclusion of Chinese immigrant workers in the Pacific Northwest in the late 19th century. “We are literally repeating history,” he says, pointing to Trump’s Muslim travel ban “which is based on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.”
Douglas Coupland loves Helvetica font
In an essay for Granta, Vancouver’s most famous novelist admits to a fascination with typography. His all-time favorite? Helvetica Neue (T1) 75 Bold. This obsession with type, he writes, is indicative of a larger concern with writing as visual form of art. “Once sensitized to text as an art object, the visual artist must, in a way, learn his or her own language all over again from scratch.”
That’s all for today from Cascadia Daily which uses the Lato font (unless your browser doesn’t have it, and substitutes Helvetica or some inferior substitute). –Andrew Engelson
Photo credit: coast redwood by Miguel Vieira CC BY-SA 2.0