Recent interviews
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alternative fluency Clarise Foster: How does a piece of poetry/art take root for you creatively? And how might you begin to work on a piece, does it most often begin as/with text? a rawlings: Relationship. With land, self, friend, language. I’ve been running in counter-clockwise circles on North Atlantic foreshores. To make contact with. To land as in to arrive as in to touch. Down. Deeper, farther, under. To under ...
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An interview with Jeramy Dodds CLARISE FOSTER: One the first official acts of the initial Icelandic immigrants when they arrived in New Iceland, a reserve on the southwest shores of Lake Winnipeg, in 1875 was to name their first town site Gimli—a place described in your recent translation of the Poetic Edda as the ever-after paradise of the gods. After fleeing extremely harsh environmental and economic conditions in Iceland, ...
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An Interview with Michael Prior Hannah Green: Jen Sookfong Lee recently wrote a powerful essay* about the state of CanLit. She writes that “CanLit has always been heavily weighted to a certain kind of author writing a certain kind of narrative” and “CanLit has never been about the diversity of voices.” Your work doesn’t fit into the “certain type of narrative” Sookfong Lee describes as being popular in CanLit, and your voice is ...
New poetry
- The day dawns on and undoes us The wet sand and sweat that mortared / our hands since dusk scorched / and mouldered to dust. Still / / ...
- Gimli/Kanada / Icelander, 6 ½ fet, 250 lbs / (höfuðið samsvarandi / tjúguskegg (rauðlitt) / undan fornmanninum / ESK / ...
- Blue Spruce It stands up / for wildness / in the face of the civil / lies told by the humming wires / overhead in the ...
- Wreckage When Grimsvötn’s eruption wiped / out a steel bridge, floodwater bending / the massive beams like origami, / ...
- Yes, ‘I’m Happy’ I went looking for someplace to hide / the ocean. Selfish girl. / Trying to shut my eyes in a wave. / Line ...
Essays and reviews
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Review: Once in Blockadia by Stephen Collis Once in Blockadia is Stephen Collis’s sixth solo full-length book of poems (he also collaborated with Jordan Scott for 2013’s DECOMP). It comprises five titled suites, two of which are a 12-page meditative poem (“Home at Gasmere”) and an even longer serial ...
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Review: The Significance of Moths by Shirley Camia Toronto poet Shirley Camia maps the immigrant experience through lyric minimalism and vivid imagery in her second collection, The Significance of Moths. Divided into six sections — “In the Palm of an Evening,” “The Portrait Unravelling,” “Humbled Knowing,” “A ...
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A Logos No One Can Agree On (Part 1 of “Groundwork: Tracing the Tradition of Rhetoric in Poetry”)
It's been about 100 years since a coterie of Modernist poets exiled rhetoric from poetics. There have been outsiders and outliers, of course, but for the most part, the Modernists have been so successful that the mere hint of rhetoric in a poem is enough for it to be castigated as non-literary. Poetic discourse has ...
