three hours of tremble
on a thin blue mat i trace
escape routes on google maps
fantasize quiet in my palms
i am fevered and adept i bode
vibration bid low on eBay
Ben Robinson | DREAM HOME
I come to
in the black
and it’s pouring
and I’m not
sure which
house I’m in
not that I have
Trish Salah | PROCEDURES FOR TURNING
If you like, you can begin with a choice: inside or outside?
Ask, what are you doing there? I think you’re in our bed… I guess
our bed is still warm. Are you? Other things follow, you.
Jasmine Gui | RESURGENT ARTEFACTS (Winner, Vallum Poetry Award 2022)
this morning, a hole appears in your stomach. you rinse dishes that
roll inward. sprinkle flowers which disappear. your heartbeat ragged
like stems rotting in still water. it is no small devastation. sprung
without antecedent or count in. just a slow sink.
Emilie Lafleur | DISTANCE (Finalist, Vallum Award for Poetry 2022)
To say they distanced
to say it wasn’t about spit
What began as a statement of rot
after reading a book about rot
Dream of Me As Water: Catching Up with David Ly
Jake Byrne interviewed David about his new book, Dream of Me as Water, in late 2022. They spoke for an hour. This is an excerpt of their conversation.
The Most Charming Creatures by Gary Barwin | Review by Bill Neumire
Thus, with the poem “Everything,” begins Gary Barwin’s latest poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures. Barwin, who has written 26 books, is also a composer (he earned his PhD in music composition) and multidisciplinary artist. Progressing in four sections, The Most Charming Creatures—follow-up to Barwin’s recent 2019 Selected Poems: For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe—takes its title from a science monograph. Explaining the title in an interview with Open Books, Barwin said:
The Quiet in Me by Patrick Lane | Review by Patrick Connors
When I heard Harbour Publishing were releasing a posthumous book by Patrick Lane, I knew it would be a must-read collection. Lane became one of the finest writers of his generation or any other by writing poetry at once easily accessible and breathtakingly lyrical.
Trailer Park Shakes By Justene Dion-Glowa | Review by Tara McGowan-Ross
Trailer Park Shakes is a lot of things, and in being a lot of things contains a lot of things to like. It’s working-class writing, in the classical, economic-theory sense: this is not the writing of a suburban expatriate who just learned the word “kyriarchy” in their MFA. This is not even the explicitly Marxist poetry of writers like Joe Wallace, Avery Lake, or Brendan Joyce—it expresses, in fact, the violent ways capitalism robs the most economically vulnerable of the material requirements for organizing (From “The Slow Creeping Feeling that Everything Will Not be Okay”: “rebellion quelled by the almighty dollar / I’m too busy / I gotta go to work / I got a family to feed”).