contemporary poetry
We are honored to share a new chapbook titled SHOOKY SESSION 2: FRANZ KAFKA, THE BLUE OCTAVO NOTEBOOKS, 12 MAY 2023, PARC TRENHOLME
by Jason Camlot and Stuart RossÂ
…each creature carries a means of hearing that reflects the environment…one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
—Franz Kafka, from The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem THE DAY I MADE IT TO HARVARD by Amlanjyoti Goswami
An Interview with Poets Daniel Cowper and Emily Osborne, and Reviews of Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) and Osborne’s Safety Razor (Gordon Hill Press, 2023)
by Bill Neumire
Almost to the point of absurdity, What’s it all for? is the central question of our lives; it echoes deep in all other questions, catches us in the car as we realize we’ve been working too much and forgetting what we’re working for, whispers to us as we make our art.
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem OAHU by Maureen Korp.
Jason Camlot is a Montreal-based poet and an English professor at Concordia University. Over the course of his formidable career, he’s published four poetry collections and several academic texts. Camlot’s scholarly research ranges from Victorian literary style to contemporary sound poetry. He runs SpokenWeb, a collaborative research project interrogating literary practices from an interdisciplinary perspective, and has recently published two new books, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings, and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. We spoke with Camlot about the intersection of research and creation, the meaning of the archive, and his many ongoing projects.
What is a box garden, if not rooted rootlessness? And what else might a prose poem be, but a box for seeding the language of flowers? In this shorthand account of self-consciousness, in which lanky lines à la sestinas slalom a chain of chockablock text, the speaker is swathed in a Québécois troupe from whom he’s also excluded.
Enjoy the selected poem from Postal Work or, Day After Day by Edie Reaney Chunn, winner of 2nd place in the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Enjoy the selected poem from Weathering Pen by Laura Amsel, winner of 3rd place in the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award.
T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetic suite, The Waste Land, of 1922, was born of the Götterdämmerung that was The Great War. Its voices (personas) recount the loss of faith, the rubble-proven absurdity of European (colonial) ‘superiority,’ and the brazen (sexual) amorality afflicting its civilzation, i.e., the displacement of Jesus by jazz, of classicism by capitalism, and of law-and-order by the orgasm.Â
