Excerpt from The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove

Fernaldia pandurata and Diabrotica adelpha get symbiotic in Christie Pits

Fresh loroco, importing banned. Oblong 

little smugglers, edible blossoms, green-

sheathed, pale inside. Insipid. Pandemic 

first date in rain. Sipping cheap white wine from 

a pink plastic cup, SLUT scrawled across the 

bus shelter. I text a friend a selfie. 

At least you don’t have herpes, she says, plus 

a broken toe. Tastes green, like broccoli, 

artichoke, or chard. Overtones of nuts. 

High in niacin. Most vigorous vine, 

finely pubescent, minutely hairy. 

Upper leaves blunt at the base, the lower, 

cordate. Heart-shaped. Bright pulse on tongue. The buds 

an aphrodisiac, the root — poison.

Hands soft despite knife nicks, scorch scars. Nimble 

tease, wet lips to collarbone as I come. 

Between lockdowns, opens a restaurant 

on his birthday. Then robbed, twice. Menus and 

trauma monologues: curled fetal in the 

back of his car after a bong hit, sure 

of being hunted. The bridgetop panic 

attack in New York for a death metal 

show. How he sold his car and never drove 

again. I offer doomsday cults, psych wards, 

stitches, suicides. I may have been a 

refugee, but you’re from Dunnville! Festive, 

invasive, an orange-necked crop killer — 

hard flea, tough to slaughter, dirty daughter.

Second date, asks if he can slap me. Where? 

Third date, so worried he’s having a stroke. 

Arteries tangled like reasons he thinks 

his father left. We agree on nothing. 

I win every debate. He admits that 

it’s a turn-on. He pulls my hair when I 

suck his cock, but never when I ask him 

to. The midnight phone calls reading aloud 

our worst reviews: This book’s so depressing! 

or Why all the chopped cabbage?! I’m always 

hungriest on the nights I most need sleep, 

when every small delicacy unfurls 

a threat. Don’t let go of me, he whimpers, 

then recoils when I whisper, You can stay.

"Fernaldia pandurata and Diabrotica adelpha get symbiotic in Christie Pits" from Tinder Sonnets © 2026 by Jennifer LoveGrove. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.

From acclaimed writer Jennifer LoveGrove comes an electric poetry collection exploring female sexual desire, contemporary dating, misogyny, and middle age that reflects and embodies our social media-saturated times.

Unabashedly confessional and radically vulnerable, The Tinder Sonnets rallies against the long-standing demand that “women of a certain age” politely accept being rendered non-sexual. Each poem is based on a date, relationship, or contemporary dating insight, and highlights how misogyny impacts the way we connect in the modern world–or don’t.

Juxtaposing folklore and the natural world against the digital sphere of texting and dating apps, this is poetry that defies invisibility and instead confronts and subverts it through a discerning feminist lens. While experimenting with the traditional form of the sonnet, these sonically textured poems are playful and wry, erotic and joyful, all while refusing to shy away from palpable anger, frustration, and disappointment.

Centering strength and resilience in the face of a resurgence of misogynistic chauvinism, The Tinder Sonnets is a staunch refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, or to be quiet and polite.

Photo credit: Sharon Harris

JENNIFER LOVEGROVE is the author of the Giller Prize–longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as three poetry collections: Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award), I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. She is currently working on a new novel, and creative nonfiction. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and Squirrel Creek Retreat in rural Ontario.

Excerpt from How I Bend Into More by Tea Gerbeza

Excerpt from How I Bend Into More by Tea Gerbeza. Published by Palimpsest Press. Copyright Tea Gerbeza, 2024. Reprinted with permission.

Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2024) re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet’s body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centers “the double architecture / of  ( metamorphosis (.”

Tea Gerbeza is the author of How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers. She is a neuroqueer, disabled poet, writer, editor, and multimedia artist creating in oskana kâ-asastêki in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, SK) and on the Homeland of the Métis. She primarily works with paper in her visual art, but also creates digital works on her scanner (scanography). Her writing and artwork focus on themes of reclaiming disabled identity, disability justice, the Bosnian-Croatian diaspora, queer platonic friendships, and the complexities of pain. Her artwork has been exhibited at The Art Gallery of Regina. Tea has a very loud laugh, and is one of four Pain Poets.

Most recently, Tea was a finalist for YWCA Regina’s 2026 Women of Distinction awards in the Igniting Equity category. In 2023, She was recognized by SK Arts as one of 75 strong emerging artists that makes the future of Saskatchewan arts exciting. Tea’s poem “Body of the Day” was a People’s Choice Award finalist in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2024 2-Day Poem Contest. In 2022, Tea won the Ex-Puritan’s Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. She also made the longlist for Room magazine’s 2022 Short Forms contest. Her scanograph, “My Father Catches Me Confronting Memory,” won an Honourable Mention in Room magazine’s 2020 Cover Art Contest, and she was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Emerging Poet Prize.

Tea holds a BA (Hons.) in English (2017) and an MA in Creative Writing and English from the University of Regina (2019). Tea’s thesis work for her MA was SSHRC funded. She also holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan (2021).

Photo of Tea by Ali Lauren.

Power Q & A with Mallory Tater

Q: How do the practices of swimming and poetics intersect?

A: I discovered my love of swimming in 2019. One of my best friends had just died, and I was searching for escapism—away from screens, away from work, and, in some ways, away from my own body. The weightlessness of being submerged in the public pool eased my angst and softened the tension and grief in my neck and shoulders. The quiet beneath the water cleared my mind. The rhythm I could build toward, channel, and disrupt brought me a sense of control and steadiness. Stripping down my body and taking a warm shower before and after felt reverent. Small talk with strangers—those quiet good mornings in the lobby and the lanes—became part of the day’s calm order. The pool, like the poem, became a place of repetition, refining, and resistance. 

The poetic line is like a length—it’s a unit of offering, brief and intentional. Like a chosen stroke, a line engages with a complete thought, opening it into being through movement and language. Like poetry, swimming is the complete interaction of the body. Like swimming, poetry is a practice that commits to being adrift. It is active, afloat. As there are different strokes in swimming, there are different poetic forms expressing both constraint and release. 

In my creative practice, I consistently write poems in response to inquiries I wish to address—and these inquiries often surface at the pool while I swim lengths. While writing Lockers, I always surfaced back to the world of competitive athletics: the cultural impact sports have on youth, their mental and physical health, and the ways they haunt the adult body. Other recurring themes include grief, girlhood, and memory. In the book’s titular long poem, the speaker contemplates death, the body, gender roles, and language while watching a swim team of skilled athletes warm up before practice. It’s an act of vicarious envy for their talent and fear for their vulnerability.

Poetry lives in community, but also in the solitary urge to create—like a public pool where we are alone together. Our bodies pass in a shared liminality, each holding strength in individuality, like the poetic voice itself. Swimmers thrive among swimmers; poets thrive among poets.  To read water is to swim in a poem: immersion, fluidity, and sensory awareness merge in a call that welcomes all of our bodies into this shared language.

Lockers are for Bearcats Only  by Mallory Tater offers poetry that traces the complexities of grief, the importance of destigmatizing dialogue around suicide, and the beauty and complicated core of girlhood friendships while improving our collective understanding of mental health awareness and suicide prevention in an approachable, concrete, and empathetic way.

The poems spill out from the confluence of grief and water. After losing one of her closest friends, the poet began swimming laps—part meditation, part therapy, part escapism—immersed in the depths of the public pool. There, she found herself haunted by the strange tension between fitness / surrender and memory / motion where ghosts of girlhood, catholicism, and addiction rose to the surface.

These themes haunt Lockers Are for Bearcats Only – a tender, unguarded exploration of loss, embodiment, and the currents that carry us through life with and without those who shaped us.

About Mallory Tater: 

Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. Lockers are for Bearcats Only is her second poetry collection.

Excerpt from Lockers are for Bearcats Only by Mallory Tater

SUN GONE

With an unnaturally faint heart, I clasp
rooted qualms that match my own:
fears hidden in worn rock,
fears that rest in vertebral gaps.
Cora—she is the tallest.
She climbs in dark, and I write 
our names in clay with a thin,
child-legged branch. All the way 
up now; the sand and Cora’s legs meld,
grit rains down from her feet 
into my open mouth. I wish Cora 
would fall, only in dream, 
so she won’t feel the rocks, 
the enormity of the rocks below 
where I stand and speak of things
too faint. If I could see Cora now
I’d see the winding sky has shrunk her,
but we would watch the damp 
vectors of mountains.   
She would pause in binding worship,     
she would pause,
every reef of her bones         
would pause.

EARTHQUAKE KIT

I gorge on chickpeas, undrained and stinking,
under the bed, saved for our earthquake kit—
that day, we all anticipate
Vancouver to be ensorcelled by one stoned
and shoulder-chipped God.

Boundary Bay will draw a high fever.
Mount Baker will headache with fear.
We will hide under ourselves,
whisper we should have moved
to Pembroke or Antigonish when we got grants.

Tonight, it’s not that I planned
to eat our cluster of rations—Nature Valley bars,
canned pickerel, homemade fruit leather—
it’s that grief clutched me and would not let
me walk. I could not walk the serpentine

trail down Cambie Street to No Frills
for orange juice and frozen pizza.
I could not walk to Kia Foods
for kale and brown bread.
I can eat grief now. I trim wrappers with scissors,

brine my lips with small, tinned fish, 
all those bones, my mouth gnathic in missing you.
I took one of her velour sweaters
from your closet. I wear it often. I did not steal
her Ariana Grande CLOUD perfume

but I sprayed it on my wrists and neck.
I did snap a photo of a photo—her beautiful childhood
self on a toboggan—
gap-toothed, forever-girl, winter
splashed on her cheeks. When we were girls

we’d weave our hair together until we were conjoined,
we’d wear g-strings and tell lies to our moms,
we’d tell lies about ourselves to each other
under the glow of lava and ice fiber lamps,
all because we were bored and breathing.
My survival has become silent—

it’s not legumes, an emergency radio, AA batteries.
I am not afraid of The Big One.
I am not afraid of some drunk God.
I am afraid of what I can do without her.
And how she can’t see me doing it.

Mallory Tater and her poetry collection, Lockers are for Bearcats Only (Palimpest Press, February 15, 2025)

Lockers are for Bearcats Only  by Mallory Tater offers poetry that traces the complexities of grief, the importance of destigmatizing dialogue around suicide, and the beauty and complicated core of girlhood friendships while improving our collective understanding of mental health awareness and suicide prevention in an approachable, concrete, and empathetic way.

The poems spill out from the confluence of grief and water. After losing one of her closest friends, the poet began swimming laps—part meditation, part therapy, part escapism—immersed in the depths of the public pool. There, she found herself haunted by the strange tension between fitness / surrender and memory / motion where ghosts of girlhood, catholicism, and addiction rose to the surface.

These themes haunt Lockers Are for Bearcats Only – a tender, unguarded exploration of loss, embodiment, and the currents that carry us through life with and without those who shaped us.

About Mallory Tater: 

Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. Lockers are for Bearcats Only is her second poetry collection.

Excerpt from NMLCT by Paul Vermeersch

Excerpt from NMLCT by Paul Vermeersch. Published by ECW Press. Copyright Paul Vermeersch. Reprinted with permission.

About NMLCT:

Poetry that explores our “post-truth” society, NMLCT holds up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm.

“Paul Vermeersch has become more daring and emphatic with every poetry collection, and this book is a blistering mourner’s lament: audacious, brutal, compassionate, and darkly ecstatic. ‘What on earth,’ he asks, ‘has happened here, and when? Who is the astronaut and who is the ape?’” — Stuart Ross, author of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

Fables and fairy tales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists.

All precisely 16 lines long — identically formed as though mass-produced — these poems are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial. But it also foretells a different future, one where the air and the grass and the trees, and all the life they engender, might always be genuine and sensed and safe.

Photo of Paul Vermeersch by Bianca Spence

Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.

Power Q & A with Stephanie Bolster

Q: Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. Given that the storm and its aftermath are a primary subject of Long Exposure, did you time the book’s publication to coincide with the 20th anniversary?

A: The timing of the book’s release was coincidental, though it’s a fortunate coincidence in that Katrina and the subsequent levee breaches that wreaked such devastation in New Orleans are back in the public consciousness and may make readers more interested in the perspective the book offers. Sadly, the inequalities the disaster highlighted are even more acute now than they were then, and the climate change that contributed to the storm has only worsened.

I had visited New Orleans twice before Katrina, so I paid particular attention to the news stories during the storm. The extent of the chaos and devastation, and the human suffering caused not only by the storm itself but by systemic failures and inequalities, shocked me. 

In 2009, I visited a retrospective of Robert Polidori’s work at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal. I had been drawn to his photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl since first seeing them several years earlier, but had avoided writing about them because I worried the subject matter was too predictable, given that I have often written about photographs and that I tend to be drawn to bleak subjects. I was also uncomfortable with the voyeurism of the photographs, which depict human-centered spaces (often private homes) in the absence of the humans who lived and worked there. And I was even more uncomfortable with my own interest in this material. 

In the museum that day, I realized that the only way to write about these photographs would be to interrogate my own fascination. I had done something similar in exploring my ambivalence about zoos, but this felt like a riskier, more difficult kind of questioning. I knew I wanted the work that would become Long Exposure to be a book-length poem. I wanted it to centre perspective and work associatively. I had no idea how to write it. 

The structural, aesthetic, and ethical challenges this project posed are part of the reason I worked on it for so long. I was also raising two children and teaching creative writing full-time. After a decade, I thought the project was finished, but as I read through the manuscript in the first few months of the COVID pandemic, I couldn’t help seeing connections between events and experiences of that time and many passages in the book. So the project kept expanding, and could have continued to expand had I not decided that I needed to move on. 

When Palimpsest accepted the book and I learned that it would appear in 2025, I wasn’t thinking about the Katrina anniversary. I wish we could mark this anniversary by focusing on positive societal and systemic changes that have happened since, as indeed there have been some. But many of those are in the process of being lost, certainly in the U.S. Much of the Lower Ninth Ward, the area most devastated by the levee breaches, has yet to be rebuilt. I stopped working on this book, but the urgency I felt in writing it is not over.

About Long Exposures:

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.

About Stephanie Bolster:

Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, began as an exploration of Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl, and extended inward and outward from there. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French (Pierre Blanche). Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.

Excerpt from Long Exposure

Excerpt from Long Exposure by Stephanie Bolster. Reprinted by permission of Palimpsest Press.

Long Exposure by Stephanie Bolster

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.

Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Award. Her work has been translated into French (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d’Alice, Les Éditions du Noroît, 2007), Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. She edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope), the inaugural volume in that ongoing series; and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000.

Excerpt from Ajar by Margo LaPierre

Manic Wire

Do you like my braids? Pinterest taught me.
Curls come tumbling.
I have a room just for this. Night terrors and vanity.
Pigeons, rroux rroux.
Rroux, rroux. It sounds like American poets.
Sounds like opaque familiarity.

Words can be barriers to define self, concisely.

Call me modal (a helping verb): domestic, gullible.
Or fierce. Woo me. Count me among the wombed
wombing. Periodically cocooning.

Time flattens.

Medication insulates the raw copper wire.

Do something about heavy doorways.
Push or something.

Curtains could be plusher, tender.
Fear the slender monster where the waves
part ways.
Light.

Keep out light
-hearted nurses with their blue
triage forms.

Scratchy upholstering.
Too many beeps to calm down.
What is it to have this body?

High, a ceiling light,
or a spent weapon, holstered.

Exoskeleton

A grasshopper thuds in flight: my scapula.
My shoulder aches thanks to pavement’s pull.
My tibia: a mongoose hiding in all this flesh,
hoarding eggs. My throat: a highway, surging.
So why can’t I speak? The warm bath
of time floats around me, cooling.
I am always leaving: the being beyond the word.
My kneecaps are heartbeats, hibernating bears.
Phalanges: fish spines laid out along a sandy lake.
Blood clots run through me monthly
like so many blackberries. Firefly children
test the word mother before I wake.
Smother fire before it burns the curtains. An abyss
beyond that word’s promise: mother. Parent?
What about platelet? Or blood not mixed, or bones
not formed? What shaky instrument do I have
with which to prolong life: hips? That’s it?

Hysterosonogram

I have seen three perinatal psychiatrists
this month; each one’s advice
goes against the others’
and everything I’ve been warned about
for a decade.

Their questions of my history make me
red with light inside. It aches.
I wear a sheet while the doctor
inserts a catheter, balloon.

On the monitor my uterus: a planet
where hurt is the mother tongue.
Light skidding over valleys and ridges: a site
resistant to damage.

Light blipping over ova and striated flesh:
pomegranate gems.

Afterward, a neighbourhood walk.
The five p.m. sun will slick
eavestroughs golden, starburst windows.
I will bring my face into the flares
above the hard snow,
my body booming
with old griefs.

I was told there would be pain.
It’s not the pain I remember.
The pain I remember hooks like light
through an open stitch.

Ahead, in the sky, a percussion of pigeons.
Ahead, in the street, a leashed dog.

Excerpt from Ajar  © 2025 by Margo LaPierre. Reprinted by permission of Guernica Editions.

Ajar by Margo LaPierre, published by Guernica Editions (October 31, 2025)

More about Ajar:

The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.

Margo LaPierre (Photo credit: Curtis Perry)

More about Margo LaPierre:

Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection.

Power Q & A with Lorne Daniel

Q: Your poetry collections, What is Broken Binds Us (University of Calgary Press), explores some significant disruptions: addiction and mental health challenges, family estrangement and an unexpected ancestral connection to slavery. How does poetry arise from these difficult realities?

A: As a writer, I’m interested in making meaning, but also in making life meaningful. Life events deliver experiences, and we are guaranteed big helpings of grief and upset and joy. I explore these, initially, so that I can see life more clearly myself. Some of the poems about family estrangement in this book started simply with me wanting to record what was going on – to create a record. But then, I have an urge to do more with it, to explore the nuances of the experiences and to create relationships. What are the connections between this event and that sense of concern or well-being? What does this remind me of? What images are dancing around in my subconscious as I jot down the ‘facts’ of an incident? Why? I don’t set out to answer every question, because life never answers every question. But the poetry becomes one way of processing life. When things begin to fall into place in a poem, to create some clarity for me, the creative work also starts to become something that other people can relate to. There are inevitably points of resonance in the human experience, when is its artfully reflected in a poem or painting or sculpture. The difficult life experiences can become something of deeper value. 

What is Broken Binds Us by Lorne Daniel (University of Calgary Press)

What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma.

What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.

In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.

Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.

Lorne Daniel

About Lorne Daniel:

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.

Excerpt from The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston

Traditional Nest Material

Crows and magpies using anti-bird spikes
to build nests, researchers find

My sister says How could you
bring a child into this world.
I get it—not like galvanised iron
is the ideal nest lining. 

Who’d choose polycarbonate
spikes in the morning,
needle pricks at night? But why
let the world win. Am I right?

I don’t know about bring, but
I’d toss a kid into the mix.
Breed ‘em tough. Malicious compliance
I’d teach, if the tarmac stinks

shit wherever, if the phone rings constantly
faux-ring constantly back.
I wouldn’t rather not exist.
City blocks function as NICU incubator,

smog clouds my biological clockface
but I swear the apocalypse
is always incoming, for all epochs. Like
the half-portion of peanut butter

slicked in the jar—won’t you scrape,
twirl your knife like a feather?
As a father, I’d come to terms.
I’d spread further. Even here, even now.

“Traditional Nest Material”, excerpted from The Character Actor Convention © 2025 by Guy Elston. Reprinted by permission of The Porcupine’s Quill.

The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston, published by The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025.

About The Character Actor Convention:

A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell all exposé of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers – why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And all the while, character actors gather for the endless convention...

Guy Elston’s debut is a curious smorgasbord of personas, voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting ‘I’ questions its relation to itself. Wist, wit, and obsession rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner. 

The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It’s something else.

Guy Elston

About Guy Elston:

Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He’s a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine.

Power Q & A with Guy Elston

Q: Your debut collection The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) is full of persona poems, monologues and dialogues. The speaker is variously an animal, an object, a chemical element, a season, even someone on a date with King Arthur. Why?

A: To put it simply, because I’m not that interested in myself. Which isn’t true, of course – what poet isn’t obsessed with themselves – but perhaps I'm not that interested in the front-facing, autobiographical concept of ‘Guy Elston’. Memory, identity, the cause and effect of life and its happenings – it’s all a sheer mountain face, senseless. I need an angle, a longer way round.

Poetry can be so many wonderful things, and there’s clearly no one superior model. It can be urgent, timely and important, absolutely. Or, the complete opposite. I like to see my poetry simply as a form of storytelling. I’m most interested in forgotten, impossible, niche encounters and viewpoints, the kind which can thrive best in the literary-popcorn realm of poems. A snatched glimpse through a window into a courtyard you never knew was there. Some kind of masked ritual is happening in the courtyard. Think Invisible Cities, but snack-sized.

This is not to say that my psyche doesn’t fill the book. If anything, the book is even more full of me than if I wrote straight confessional poetry. When I write from the POV of Jonah’s whale, for example, I’m not starting from scratch – I'm necessarily depositing a bunch of my own hang-ups and melodramas into the voice of the whale.

I guess the short answer is, persona poems and odd dialogues are my way of incorporating Emily Dickinson’s famous “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” into my practice. I approach myself at a slant through these guises. If I see a flash of something I could be, or once was, or that might seem knowable to someone, somewhere, that’s my thrill. As for why – it’s simple. All I ever want is to make you both laugh and cry.

The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025)

About The Character Actor Convention:

A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell all exposé of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers – why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And all the while, character actors gather for the endless convention...

Guy Elston’s debut is a curious smorgasbord of personas, voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting ‘I’ questions its relation to itself. Wist, wit, and obsession rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner. 

The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It’s something else.

Guy Elston

About Guy Elston:

Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He’s a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine.

Birdology II: Excerpt from Birdology by Carolyne Van Der Meer

Birdology II 

On our way to run errands, we passed a parked car and heard 
splashing. A look down revealed a host of house sparrows 
bathing themselves in a convenient puddle—an unexpected 
beginning to a warm fall morning. 

Sometimes we don’t know what awaits us. How suddenly, on a 
random day of puddle splashing, there is also a feeling of 
bereftness that cannot be contained. A highway pile-up of grief. 
When I woke up one morning to find the family dog—my dog—
had been given to a farmer, no goodbyes. The young man who 
got electrocuted in our backyard after his hedge cutters hit the 
arc of a high-voltage line. My father’s skeletal face as he moved 
towards death, unconscious in a palliative ward. How my mother
-in-law lost her speech after dementia took its final hold. And 
now, how my father-in-law is a prisoner in his hospital bed, 
awaiting diagnosis as death’s beacon is bright. And as my 
mother gives in and says a care home is the only next step—a 
place of antiseptic loneliness, its dotted line the one I sign on. 

I am overcome by the anchor of loss, rooted somewhere in my 
pelvis, my body wracked with a melancholy for what I cannot 
change, for what is normal, for what is the cycle of life. I am not 
unique, this is not unique. As my father-in-law said today, we all 
begin and end in the same way: it is the middle that makes a life. 
And the wisdom of a faraway Dutch cousin: live slow, for we will 
all get there eventually. 

There was nothing weighing down the sparrows in their puddle, 
no sadness that I could discern. They flapped their wings, 
flicking the water off their little bodies. And dove in again.

Excerpt from Birdology published by Cactus Press, copyright © 2025 by Carolyne Van Der Meer.

Birdology (Cactus Press, May 2025) by Carolyne Van Der Meer is a tender collection of poems and essays moves through what she calls the “spell of grief,” accompanied by flocks of gulls, house sparrows and rock pigeons. I’d love for you to consider this chapbook for review. 

Birdology is an exploration of loss of memory, of autonomy—and ultimately of the loved ones themselves. Against a backdrop of urban and natural environments filled with everyday birds, she considers how our relationships with our parents evolve as they age, need us more—and eventually leave us. Through a quintet of flash essays and a handful of poems, Van Der Meer gently dissects the layers of emotion in grief with the delicacy of a feather. 

Carolyne Van Der Meer

About Carolyne Van Der Meer:

Carolyne Van Der Meer is a Montreal journalist, public relations professional and university lecturer. Her articles, essays, short stories and poems have been published internationally. Her five published books are: Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience (WLUP, 2014); Journeywoman (Inanna, 2017); Heart of Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems | Du Coeur à l’âme : La vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (Guernica Editions, 2020); Sensorial (Inanna, 2022) and All This As I Stand By (Ekstasis Editions, 2024). Chapbook publications include One Week’s Worth but a Lifetime More (Local Gems Press, 2022) and Broken Pieces: Hospital Experiences (2023); Birdology is forthcoming from Cactus Press in May 2025.

Power Q & A with Amanda Shankland

Speech Dries Here on the Tongue (edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland) is an anthology of poetry by Canadian authors, published by The Porcupine’s Quill, exploring the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health.

It’s been listed as a book to read by Quill & Quire and CBC Books, and we’re honoured to have one of the editors, Amanda Shankland, join us for this Power Q & A to talk about where this anthology started for her.

Speech Dries Here on the Tongue edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland, Porcupine’s Quill, 2025.

The idea for Speech Dries on the Tongue came to me during the long months of the pandemic. We all felt trapped in some way, in our homes, in our families, in our heads. Long walks were an escape from isolation, from uncertainty, and sometimes, from ourselves. Connecting with nature has always brought me peace. I thought about how others around the world might be connecting with nature at a time when we all stood face-to-face with an unclear future. 

I started thinking a lot about how the pandemic wasn’t just a health crisis- it was also part of a larger story about disconnection, environmental loss, and how fragile our relationships with each other and the natural world can be.

In early 2021, I lost a dear friend to suicide. It was devastating and sad to know that despite the love of his family and friends, he did not get help in time. It reminded me of how important it is to find ways of connecting, especially in difficult times. 

Poetry has always been a space for me to connect, share my inner struggles and remind myself that in spite of how difficult life can be, we are all experiencing similar emotions- grief, anger, love, frustration, and hope- are all part of the human experience.

That’s how this book started- as an idea to gather voices together. To create something honest about how we were living through this moment. About how we are part of the world around us and how who we are is fundamentally shaped by our environment. 

Speech Dries on the Tongue is an anthology about isolation, connection, environmental grief, and the ways we care for each other in uncertain times.

More about Speech Dries on the Tongue :

Speech Dries Here on the Tongue is an anthology of poetry by Canadian authors exploring the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health. This threat of environmental collapse has brought with it a sense of impending annihilation and has contributed to the current mental health crisis, made crueller by a global pandemic that highlighted our fragile nature. These are poems by writers who have used their words to both articulate and navigate this crisis, unpacking the complex interplay between mental and environmental health in order to alert, inform, and inspire readers.

Edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland, the collection includes work by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Canal Smiley, Amanda Shankland, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar Mohammadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, nina jane drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton, Gary Barwin.

Amanda Shankland

About Amanda Shankland:

Amanda Shankland, Ph.D., is a writer, educator, and researcher whose work moves between creative storytelling and critical scholarship. She is the author of Cultivating Community: How Discourse Shapes the Philosophy, Practice and Policy of Water Management in the Murray–Darling Basin (Sydney University Press, 2024) and editor of the poetry collection Speech Dries on the Tongue (Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), which explores mental health, climate grief, and resistance. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures and Parvati Magazine, among others.

Shankland’s academic research focuses on water governance, agroecology, and food systems. She has recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Canadian Food Studies, and the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets. She is also a contributing author to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Food and Society and an editor with Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Carleton University and a Master’s in Public Policy from Toronto Metropolitan University. She teaches politics and food systems at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa and is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters.

Power Q & A with Alex Gurtis

We became aware of American poet Alex Gurtis through his work as a literary critic and then further familiarized ourselves with his work in the literary community—specifically, his work uplifting Canadian authors. Then, we learned more about his poetry, and our interest was doubly piqued. We picked up his chapbook, When the Ocean Comes to Me (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and were blown away. His work is wild and rangy and polished and devotional. We had to talk to him, and are delighted he agreed.

Welcome, Alex, to our Power Q & A series.

When the Ocean Comes to Me (chapbook) by Alex Gurtis, Bottlecap Press, 2024.

Q: Your poetry seems to exist in the midst of perpetual motion: a ribboning out to times and places and people. Would you tell us about creating this energy in your writing which makes it feel alive and electric.

A: My creative process for this collection was grounded in answering how we project our emotions onto the landscapes around us and how those spaces come back to us. As someone living in an area that is a North American ground zero for climate change, I wanted to capture the interplay between, as you put it, “the ribboning out between time and place and people.” That last word, people, is the most important. My work is very anthropocentric, focused on real people living within changing spaces. There is an ecopoetic aspect too, but I wanted to focus on humanizing the climate crisis and parallel political crisis. In the same way a landscape painter pulls from their surroundings, my subject matter was the people around me. I like to think I applied an ekphrastic gaze in freezing the world around me like a still life in motion and then bringing it to life on the page. 

In my opening poem, “Hurricane Party,” the anxiety of watching a storm barreling at you non-stop for 48 hours while you are being told the apocalypse is now, is mentally exhausting. It leaves you a little unhinged. It’s a space where you “walk backwards out of a store/with a bottle of wine” and “watch a man as cracked as the sidewalk/ juggling a baseball, football, and basketball” as entire communities are devastated. None of those experiences are made up. A lot of these poems started as collages of images around certain thematic events like Hurricane Ian. The other half of the collection is political by way of economics and really pulled from my time working in grocery, as a barista, running a bookstore, and working as an adjunct. So many people in my life have been close to or spent time houseless. Rent is high and pay is low in Orlando, Florida and the storms keep coming. My poem “Absence of a Diet Coke” began as a riff off a comment made by a peer in MFA who couldn’t buy a coke. Her credit card bounced because our TA pay got delayed a month. 

Ultimately, the real currency we are lacking isn’t dollars but time. We are reacting too slow to stop the climate crisis. Florida is under Neo-Fascist control (as is America as a whole) and the life plan we were all sold, the “American Dream” is a bunch of bollocks. “Post Capitalist Americana” could be retitled “Life in Late-Stage Capitalist America” but wouldn’t have the same snap. Still, it raises a question about identity and how it relates to place. What is America after capitalism? Is there one? Similarly, what is the Floridian identity after “the sea began to rise”? Worst case is probably an archipelago thanks to the Lake Wales Ridge but that's a lot of displaced people when we are just struggling to survive. This isn’t a uniquely Florida problem either. So many people around the country are dealing with disasters like fires that are forcing us to rethink where we live. 

Anxiety is a perpetual motion, a sort of flight response, I’m trying to capture though, to borrow a phrase from Carolyn Forché, “the poetry of witness” which I try to apply to communities and spaces that are being erased by extreme weather events incited by the political refusal to accept carbon’s role in changing our planet. Similarly, I want to create a space to help readers find anxious affirmations and grieve while also maintaining a space for readers to hold hope for the future, even if it looks vastly different than we imagined or want it to be. There is something powerful in recording the stories of the people now so people can look back and see that the world was scary, we were scared, but also, we lived.

More about When the Ocean Comes to Me:

When the Ocean Comes to Me is a collection dripping with the anxiety of the Anthropocene. Salt water rises along Florida’s coast as inhabitants watch a clock’s “hands chase each other/ along their predestined path.”

These poems meditate on how “education is a type of trauma” and ask how we can cope with the knowledge that our planet is changing before our eyes. Imagist studies of built environments come unraveled as late-stage capitalism erodes cities and natural landscapes alike.

Writer Alex Gurtis

More about Alex Gurtis:

Alex Gurtis is the author of the chapbook When the Ocean Comes to Me (Bottlecap Press, 2024). He is an assistant editor for Burrow Press and runs an occasional interview series at Barrelhouse.

A ruth weiss Foundation Maverick Poet Award Finalist and a winner of Saw Palm’s 2022 Florida Fauna and Flora contest, Alex received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. His work as a poet and critic has appeared in or is forthcoming in anthologies and publications such as Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Barrelhouse, Bear Review, HAD, Heavy Feather Review Identity, Identity Theory, Rain Taxi, The Shore and West Trade Review, among others.

An avid believer in community and leaving the world a little better than he found it, Alex serves on the board of the Kerouac Project of Orlando and is often found at the intersection of writing and place making. You can follow him on Instagram @apbg_alex, Bluesky @alexgurtis.bsky.social and Substack,

Power Q & A with Barbara Tran

Barbara Tran’s entrancing poetry collection, Precedented Parrotting (Palimpsest Press, 2024), was a finalist for the Governor General Literary Award for Poetry. This beautiful book stands as an expansive debut that plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world.

We are honoured to have Barbara join us for our Power Q & A series to speak with us about the visual impact of her work, which uses the whole stage of the page.

Welcome, Barbara!

Precedented Parrotting by Barbara Tran (Palimpsest Press, 2024)

Q: Your poems are striking in so many ways, and we’d like to focus on the visual form of your work in this collection, that seems to flit and burst, mimicking bird flight. We wonder if you could speak to us about the form of these poems. Was the form intentional? Or a natural expression of the themes addressed in your collection? Maybe a bit of both?

A: Thank you so much for this question. I absolutely love talking about form. It’s at the crux of most of my writing. If I can’t figure out the form, I usually cannot move forward with the piece. 

 I read poetry — and write most everything — out loud, meaning I have to speak the words as I’m writing them down or reading them. It rules out working in a coffeeshop.

 But, the upside of writing out loud is it tells me when a poem’s form is “off.” If I walk away from my writing and come back when I don’t really recall the words and their rhythm, and I can’t tell how to read the thing based on how it allows itself to take up space on the page, I know the form is not working to its full potential. The form should tell me where and how long the pauses are. And where the emphases. Is there a moment of contemplation?

 I come from a background where there was not much stability, so, for me, a solid left margin often feels like a lie. It’s not where I come from.

On page 33 of my book, the text falls to the lower right half of the page. At the top could have been blank white space. But when we look at a page of mostly white space and a little bit of text, our eyes automatically go directly to the text. They tend not to linger on the white space for very long before being tempted off, and what I wanted for this time/space before the text at the bottom of the page was for the reader to contemplate, to spend a moment considering what was missing. What photos would they put here? What text? Who? What was here has been silenced. Why?

 Myself, I’m so exhausted, thinking about what is missing, that I can no longer bring myself to rise to the top of the page. I’m leaving the text here at the bottom.

 On the facing page, 32, the text refers to the speaker’s beginning. (The speaker in the poem is both me and not me.) The ground shifts before the text even gets to the speaker’s birth. Then, her existence is shrouded in secrecy. There is no solid ground here. The lines shift around on the page to convey that.

They move though, with intention. There is an Easter egg hidden here for my enjoyment. I don’t expect any readers to get it, but it puts a smile on my face every time I see it. This is an origin story, and it’s shaped like the country of Vietnam.

More about Precedented Parrotting:

Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”

Poet Barbara Tran.

About Barbara Tran:

Born in New York City, Barbara Tran is an immigrant. And a settler. She writes in multiple genres. Her debut poetry book, Precedented Parroting, was a Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award. Barbara’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in Conjunctions, The Malahat Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Her poetry chapbook, In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, was selected by Robert Wrigley, as the winner of Tupelo Press’s inaugural chapbook award. Barbara's writing has been longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize and nominated for two National Magazine Awards for short fiction. Barbara authored the titular character’s narration of Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a short, virtual reality film, nominated for Best VR Story at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. She is currently at work in collaboration with Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn on the screenplay for Nguyễn's debut feature film.

A contributing co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition, Barbara has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, MacDowell Freund Fellowship, and Bread Loaf Scholarship, as well as writing residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Hedgebrook, Lannan Foundation, and Millay Arts, amongst others. Barbara is a member of the AfroMundo collective and has contributed to collaborative hybrid projects by She Who Has No Master(s). She shares her home in Dish with One Spoon Territory with her partner, the economist Bob Gazzale, and their two adopted canines, Sprocket and River.

Power Q & A with Sheila Stewart

Sheila Stewart’s stunning poetry collection, If I Write About My Father, (Ekstasis Editions, 2024) dismantles the patriarchal religious ideologies of Sheila’s upbringing by a protestant minister, while sustaining the emotional intimacy experienced in familial relationships. 

Sheila explores the daughter-father relationship, uncovering the complexities of growing up as the minister’s only daughter in a family shaped by church and manse in small-town southern Ontario. She braids narrative and lyric, the textures of liturgy and memory. While critiquing patriarchal weight and constraint, the work explores how a particular religious upbringing shapes thinking, the rhythms of language, and the fabric of consciousness. 

Sheila joins us for this Power Q & A to talk about why she decided to tackle the church and her relationship with her father with these powerful poems.

If I Write About My Father by Sheila Stewart (Ekstasis Editions, 2024)

Q: Why did you focus this collection on your relationship with your father and the church?

A: It wasn’t so much a deliberate choice to write about my father and the church, as something I was compelled to do. I was writing a dissertation at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education/University of Toronto (OISE/UT) and wrestling with my own authority as a writer. While I’ve always been drawn to ideas and learning, tackling a PhD at age 48, was intimidating. I was aware of the hierarchies and power structures of the University having worked at OISE/UT for years as a research coordinator on adult literacy issues.

Growing up in small town Southwestern Ontario as the minister’s only daughter, I was conscious of the power dynamics within our traditional Irish Canadian home and the congregations where my dad served. I’m very interested in the way religions provide stories and meaning for people to live their lives. I’m not Christian, but I was surrounded by the language and poetry of the Bible as a child. The book begins with a poem called “Altar”. I am exploring spirit and, in a sense, find it in the natural world, Lake Ontario, High Park. My earliest years were mainly indoors, in the manse and at church surrounded by parishioners, and then at school where I was known as the minister’s daughter. I needed to work through the restraint and strictures of my church upbringing to inhabit a more embodied sense of self. 

My first collection, A Hat to Stop a Train (Wolsak and Wynn), is about my relationship with my mother and her life as a minister’s wife. I’m fascinated by how family members shape each other. If I Write About My Father (Ekstasis Editions) is kind of companion piece to my first book. While the book is about aspects of my relationship with my father, it is also about authority and power of different kinds: institutional and that found as a writer, often through a long wrestle with words. 

More about If I Write About Father:

What effect do fathers and faith have on a child? In If I Write About My Father, Sheila Stewart explores the daughter-father relationship drawing on reflections about her father, a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister who immigrated to Canada and joined the United Church. Her poetry uncovers the complexities of growing up as the minister’s only daughter in a family shaped by church and manse in small-town southern Ontario. Stewart braids narrative and lyric, the textures of liturgy and memory. While critiquing patriarchal weight and constraint, the work explores how a particular religious upbringing shapes thinking, the rhythms of language, and the fabric of consciousness. In this quest, the poet draws from the sensory world by walking the woods and Lake Ontario shores. 

Sheila Stewart

More about Sheila Stewart:

Sheila Stewart’s publications include two poetry collections, A Hat to Stop a Train and The Shape of a Throat, and a co-edited anthology of poetry and essays entitled The Art of Poetic Inquiry. Awards include the gritLIT Contest, the Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words, and the Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest. Her poetry has been widely published in Canadian and international journals. She recently left teaching at the University of Toronto to devote herself to writing.