Recent interviews
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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 ...
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From the North of a Small Town to the North of Toronto Sarah Pinder, author of Cutting Room (Coach House, 2012) and Common Place (Coach House, 2017) was born in 1983 in Sault Ste. Marie and grew up in Wawa and Sault Ste. Marie. Mat Laporte, author of RATS NEST (BookThug, 2016), was born in 1984 and grew up in Sault Ste. Marie. They didn’t meet and become friends until 2012 when they both lived in Toronto. There they collaborated on various projects ...
New poetry
- Made in Bangladesh How to suck blood from this blood-sucked / image? A garment worker’s needle is suturing / the scene: she sews a ...
- Help Wanted Something is leaking / under the sink, unlocated / but gradually turning / the cardboard box / full of ...
- Half I am all that is wrong with the Old World, / and half of what troubles the New. / / I have not seen Spain or ...
- Contest winner This Came First Behind the kitchen table, April / evening struggles through stippled / glass—corn flung from cobs chewed / ...
- Contest winner Portrait of Lady with Cephalopod Is the girl in the daguerreotype / really staring down the unroofed eye / of the black box in the honeycombed ...
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 ...
