Fabienne Calvert Filteau: Three Poems
PROLOGUE from Second Growth, Creekstone Press 2014 we came for wilderness, bounding trail, rinds of trail slumping into streambed, river mud hugging our shoes, pulling ourselves deeper into the forest by its trunks we came – for the twinge of rain-aged bark in our hands, sunshade of fir, dogwood, aspen, birch mycelia flexing whispers between...
Jeremy Stewart: Welfare Suite
WELFARE SUITE I. an an afterschool special “olly olly oxen free,” I circled the snowy perimeter bushy play zone edges I hid for fear of finding out she let the kids beat on each other her youngest son was also a psychopath windmilled his skinny arms and children cowered under his temper but I wasn’t...
G.P. Lainsbury: from Half-Life
FROM HALF-LIFE, A POEM-LIKE THING “every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.” -Gabriel Brunt * * ...
Donna Kane: from Pioneer 10
PIONEER 10 Its shadow’s been gone since lift-off but it took light disappearing before lonely seemed simply alone, or if not alone then deep in the lab of the not understood, the not taste-of-ourselves in its gold dust, the not soot-plumped sweat of our brows incandescent with plutonium. Shed of silver, quick, small–...
Northern British Columbia: Six Poets
I sought these poets knowing I was catching only a slice of northern BC’s writers, in order to offer a glimpse into some of what’s going on out here. This doesn’t represent a renaissance – there have been poets toiling in these eskers and valleys for ages – but it’s proof of a region’s literature...
Kevin McPherson: faux foe
faux foe 1. lover pain but ado, mine blinder tenant ton or ours, pale fins 2. pair pour chair pays reporter rein main bail blesser bras seize dire surgeon 3. car imposition ride habits bribe pipes waters parole, volatile pond ...
Rudrapriya Rathore on Kayla Czaga: For Your Safety Please Hold On
For Your Safety Please Hold On, Kayla Czaga. Nightwood Editions (2014). Kayla Czaga’s debut collection of poetry, For Your Safety Please Hold On, manages a balance in voice and tone that is likeable, playful, domestic—but also unpredictable, full of precipices and turns. Poems such as “Gertrude Stein Loves a Girl,” “Some Girls” and “For Play” question...
Cornelia Barber in Conversation with Ana Božičević
What does it mean for the subject of a poem to embody selflessness; to face death with contemplation and elation; to strive to see our screwed up world objectively, but with care; and to rise to the occasion of an ethical poetics? Ana Božičević invited me to her lovely Lefferts Gardens apartment, made a superb...
Naomi Guttman: from The Banquet of Donny & Ari: Scenes from the Opera
THE BOOK OF LIFE Though Ari won’t believe in God, she knows that something somewhere must be counting—calories and carbon use, every inner tube she’s ever burst, every acid-crusted battery—somewhere there’s a ledger for the damage of existence: each bottle top and what it cost the Earth, the atmosphere, accruing to the rubbish mountain of...
Interview: Metatron Press
Jake Byrne: Why did you decide to start Metatron? Was there a void in the Montreal literary community or the publishing scene at large that you felt you needed to fill? Ashley Opheim, Metatron Managing Editor: In 2012, Guillaume Morissette (a close friend and now co-editor of Metatron) and I started organizing readings to expose...
Kailey Havelock on Karen Connelly: Come Cold River
Come Cold River. Karen Connelly. Quattro Books (2013). aaaaaaNot a door or a window left of that time aaaaaaNothing to walk back inside aaaaaaonly recollections of people scattered aaaaaaaaaaaaanameless or forgotten aaaaaaWhat is the use of a people’s history? (101) These lines appear in the second to last poem of Karen Connelly’s Come Cold River,...
Metatron Press: Two Poems, Two Poets
HOW BLACK? Roland Pemberton She said I was the whitest black person she'd ever met and she laughed when she said it A kind of nervous jagged laughter the rest of the room tried to gloss over Like a white glove over a black hand I wanted to show her a colour wheel Point at...
