A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Anne Boyer. Ugly Duckling Presse (2018). Against late capitalism’s yes, cruelly optimistic in its desire for automatonic affirmation of its circulation and law, Anne Boyer’s…
From Excess—The Factory (AK Press, 2018) By Leslie Kaplan, Translated by Julie Carr & Jennifer Pap The courtyard, crossing it. A factory courtyard’s absolute nostalgia. You walk between formless walls. Sheets…
Colm Tóibín noted, after watching countless performances of his play The Testament of Mary, “what happens to powerlessness once you add voice.” He was becoming aware of the power of…
Tatum Howey: Nathanaël is what we wish we could be. Nathanaël is the consequence or possibility of fruition of our actions. Nathanaël embodies what we desire. Desire makes you aware…
KNIFELIKE Three reptiles crane their necks, watching the shooting star. Consider the infinite possibility of a camera, then discontinue. …
Four poems from Dani Couture, excerpted from Listen Before Transmit. LISTEN BEFORE TRANSMIT After Peter Gizzi The connection severs itself due to your finger hovers A pause inactivity of a…
BUT TELL THE INCREDIBLE UNSTOPPABLE GIRL WONDER She’ll never regret starting over. Not how growing makes her arms and shoulders ache, or the weight of the quarter-folded tent, which she…
from Surfaces (Invisible Publishing, 2018) By Eric Schmaltz Eric Schmaltz is an artist, writer, and educator living in Toronto. His work has been previously featured in Lemon Hound as well as Jacket2, The Capilano…
Cityscape / hairnet At an event people sit in a circle (or is it a spiral?) around Jacob Wren, Aisha Sasha John and Adam Kinner. I met Adam Kinner years…
* I call you state, you call me city. Swing the trinkets every time you punch out. Text me again from the hill behind the community centre or the dry…
Sometime in the 1970s I transcribed a taped interview in which Daphne Marlatt spoke about writing, poetry, and language, perhaps the first of her “Vancouver” poems. It may have been…
Manifest Manifest A Spent Thing is, um, Gutting the Small Land. The Spent Thing of Being Together Everybody Makes Is a Small, Old Land, Having to Be Zealous. In the…
FOR YEARS THEY WANTED ME TO RESIST For years having witnessed revolving violence for years skin-bricked and sick, for years the pretty desolation of the morning, its inherent place for…
Great reading the other night at D&Q. Standouts for me were these two. Double wows. We have an excerpt up from Paige. I offer a sample from Years, Months, and…
Procrastinators rejoice! If you missed your chance to submit to our last call, you’re in luck: we’ve decided to ride the wave of volume 3.0.3 by reopening submissions for a…
How does power get situated? How do women hold it? In a correspondence recently someone used “unempowered” to describe someone with lack of access to power. They aren’t the same…
Birthday Poem Illuminated behind a skin a grey the sky with fat fast slants of snow Fire Horse poet This is a birthday poem squeaky underfoot…
DELILAH TALKS TO HERSELF “Hallelujah” from Various Positions (1984) If Leonard Cohen writes of her love then she knows this love to be a true love. He’s kneeling in her…
Welcome to Lemon Hound 3.0.3. This iteration of Lemon Hound is the third and final volume of a year-long trial association of the magazine with a course at Concordia University…
THANATOS from Zolitude (Biblioasis, 2018) By Paige Cooper This view, I make explicit to the child, has shattered the unity through which I had thought I could extend my sovereignty…
ANNE CARSON, ANTIGONE, AND THE PERILOUSNESS OF THEATRE: IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL AITKEN Phoebe Fregoli: I wanted to start—I know that you mentioned in your book that you were going…
BABIES CW: Graphic sexual scenes, NSFW When I come home, there is no one there. I make a hasty transformation. In the bedroom, I strip off my clothes—stockings and garter…
This is an excerpt from a longer chapter titled “Notes on Rape Culture” and is posted with permission from the author. Every now and then in the writing of this,…
FEAR FACTOR Looking after yourself is hard if you’re not much of a people person. Once I entered the doctor’s office and was photographed by a robot receptionist whose one…
The Inaugural Mood Criticisms from the Field: The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference and the Futurity of Poetics The temporality of our forms of poetic engagement have a strange character. On…
This Is the Homeland, Mary Hickman. Ashahta Press (2015). POEMS FOR THE WAYWARD PILGRIM: MARY HICKMAN’S THIS IS THE HOMELAND As a surgical technologist assisting in open-heart surgery, Mary Hickman…
This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt. Frontenac House (2017). In her essay “Queer Feelings,” from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed writes, “Sexual orientation involves bodies that leak…
SAILOR GARBAGE What garbage you are. What garbage you are. What simmering garbage. What are you simmering garbage? Here are the things that are eternal: 1. Garbage 2.…
The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George. Dorothy Project (2016) Writing a review for the five stories that comprise Jen George’s debut collection, The Babysitter at Rest, has been somewhat of…
Planetary Noise, Erín Moure. Wesleyan University Press (2017). MOURE INTERPRETING THE SEMIOTIC BODY Planetary Noise—a new collection of Erín Moure’s poetry edited and with an introduction by Shannon Maguire—engages in…
Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968–2008, Daphne Marlatt. Talon Books (2017). We went to see Daphne Marlatt read as part of Writers Read before we got our hands on her…
The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George. Dorothy Project (2016). IT’S A DELICATE MATTER TO BE A DIFFICULT WOMAN Clarice Lispector never understood why readers found her work opaque. The fact…
Feel Free, Zadie Smith. Hamish Hamilton (2018). It seemed to me, as I read Feel Free, Zadie Smith’s new collection of nonfiction, that every essay in the world concerns the…
LAO TZU APPLIES FOR A UNIVERSITY TEACHING POSITION To whom it may concern, and it is my hope that no one is concerned, The class I do not propose to…
Here are three short takes from our editorial collective. ML on Karen Solie: The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out The Road In Is Not the Same Road…
Margaret the First, Danielle Dutton. Catapult (2016). If atoms are so small, why not worlds inside our own? A world inside a peach pit? Inside a ball of snow? And…
Planetary Noise, Erín Moure. Wesleyan University Press (2017). THE PROXIMITY EFFECT OF ERÍN MOURE Proximity effect is what happens when a microphone is held too close to a sound…
The Purpose Pitch, Kathryn Mockler. Mansfield Press (2015). Kathryn Mockler’s chaotic third collection of poetry, The Purpose Pitch, irradiates the deep strangeness of our modern world. The collection embraces various…
Montréal, Quebec: I return to the site of an old novel. This will not always be a street of failure, even if still playing the former glamour of the seedy.…
As if dreams were a language that includes the social surface / of the body, ‘signal fire’ in the desert as the song says, the / body’s lamp glowing, armpits…
TO THE EXTENT A TRADITION CAN BE SAID TO BE DEVELOPED; IT IS MORE ACCURATE TO SAY IT CAN BE CLOTHED IN DIFFERENT FORMS As three persons in one, I…
and now famine, friend I of course, no living is continuous, we take what grows within we cast them out as though to bloodlet the life of its lesser sorrows;…
Six poems from Kathryn Mockler. Please enjoy a review of The Purpose Pitch also featured in this issue. An interview with the poet coming shortly. from The Purpose Pitch SEALED CONTAINERS —So how are we going…
FOOD Night is when you look into other people’s kitchens. Down in a first floor apartment lightly set into the frozen ground someone holds a crescent clove of garlic to…
IF If decadent, we were destructive If decaying, a nuisance If we were multitudes with wants and ligaments, we were feral If we undressed, it was to tease If underground,…
SYBILL ELEGIES the city was a bad boyfriend when I was his girl he called me late to ask who I was with when I was his girl he talked…
CATTLE OF THE SUN my ex once lived in a house later dubbed the “chattel ranch” it wasn’t a ranch when he lived there though his…
MOMENTUM EXCHANGE TETHER (A DANCE SCORE) I didn’t see the sky tonight and didn’t think about its legislators. At some point I didn’t need a better view I needed…
FACTS ABOUT XANTHIPPE The facts about Xanthippe are scant: her name, her marriage. Her husband’s words are only reported by others, so, really, we can’t be sure of much. Plato’s…
HYPERBARREN ONE: the marital bed (if i am a bright housewife) i came to this university in order to be closer to this wooden table …
For our third volume, Lemon Hound 3.0 responds to this transformative moment in our literary community by publishing work that intends to smash, upend, rally against, dream of, reclaim, and…
VIII. ANTIGONE Juliette: Antigone is like a bomb. She has three scenes and they’re like the bombs of the play somehow. Because from that there are consequences. Anne: Reverberations. Juliette:…
Disastrous Confidence: Call for work Off The Page March 15-17 Call for Submissions: Disastrous Confidence, Friday March 16th 4-6 Finding ourselves in the maw of the University, we at Off the…
Andy McGuire’s “Pool” advances an end rhyme all the way to the end of the diving board at knifepoint. Pool whirligigs across the page, traveling from New York to the…
Queer Grace No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in…
Ones Who Got Away With It I still fantasize I can do something about it. That girl in the outpatient-care facility for teenagers confided to me that she sneaked out…
Today is stunning. —Renee Gladman For our third volume, Lemon Hound 3.0 responds to this transformative moment in our literary community by calling for work that intends to smash, upend,…
This week’s poem of the week is from our own archives. We posted this in April, 2013. It’s made of reviews of women’s work. It’s still relevant. Also see Zoe’s…
ALLER/RETOUR Day recedes to darkness Day seen through the veil of night Translucent grey film cast between daylight and dark dissolving sky to lavender to mauve to white until night…
Erin Wunker: I love Anne Boyer’s poem “What Resembles The Grave But Isn’t.” I love its repetition. I love how each sentence hits the mind with the determination of someone…
Come the Revolution Come the revolution / we will the revolution / we will return to the revolution / return to the sensuous body of language / come the revolution…
We are happy to start the new year off with two pieces from Chase Berggrun’s R E D, an excavation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, forthcoming from Birds, LLC. Berggrun is a…
I’m posting this classic Virginia Woolf essay as a reminder that the personal is always interesting if it is live and in context; if there is a pulse at the…
Welcome to Lemon Hound 3.0.2! As the days get shorter, our list (and wish list!) of content grows longer. We have been working to bring you fresh and meaningful content…
Marina Carr, renowned Irish playwright, visited Concordia University this past November to give a master class and a reading of her work. Carr’s plays, which often involve meditations on violence,…
Halifax poet Sue Goyette is the author of six books of poetry including Ocean, a finalist for the 2014 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and more recently Penelope, published last month…
Six poems from Sue Goyette. We feature a folio and a conversation with the Halifax poet. from Ocean nine The idea of home was so big, so bottomless, carpenters had…
“Eye Rhymes: An Introduction to the Photography of Janieta Eyre,” Suzanne Zelazo As an innovator and agitator, Janieta Eyre (1966–) has pioneered an integrative photographic aesthetic that pushes the boundaries…
March Love, love! mini-ode to the awkward heroes of sexology, stroking, fucking, tonguing, poking–while thoroughly amazed! And to shepherds! try to be kind, not bitter. Sit on the…
white infinity net Snow touching snow. Petal and rhizome, asterisk, osteocyte. Splitcell and starry matrix of bone a sharp pain behind my left eye insomnia prickles bright as ice cream…
CRAIG HAS VERY NICE SKIN from Everything is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017) by Daniel Zomparelli My skin is sitting weirdly on my body…
I I’ve been thinking about Dalmatians. I want to say Dalmatian and mean what I say. You might say I am trying to re-live that day in which I saw…
I WANT TO TEXT YOU ABOUT ROBERT DUNCAN Robert Duncan had something to say about psychosis but I have no one to text it to. If I have no one…
INT. SHARON OLDS POEM—NIGHT Sharon’s at the window, but you’re further down the page, waiting for her husband who will return now but not forever. Sharon’s legs are jelly from fucking,…
Our Lady of Perpetual Realness and Other Stories, Cason Sharpe. Metatron Press (2017). It’s 2017, the year of the great avocado toast debacle, and Cason Sharpe’s debut chapbook of short…
The Doll’s Alphabet, Camilla Grudova, Coach House Books (2017). Camilla Grudova’s debut short story collection The Doll’s Alphabet is palpably weird. A gothic pastiche of peeling wallpaper, scurrying cockroaches, and…
A Loss for Words from The Last Word (Coach House Books, 2017) by Julia Cooper Here we are in the pews of a bright, white-walled church in the opening minutes…
INTERVIEW WITH AN EMPIRE Q: Why does a Black woman like yourself write the kind of poetry you do? A: I’m not sure what you mean by “the kind of…
Afterglow (a dog memoir), Eileen Myles. Grove Press (2017). People have feelings about dogs. Lots of feelings. Their antics are one of the Internet’s enduring consolations. I spent a whole…
With The Original Face, Guillaume Morissette takes GIF art to the novel The Original Face, Guillaume Morissette. Véhicule Press (2017). “I don’t think I’ll ever make anything that’s even half as…
Civilization Makes Me Lonely, Jennifer Nelson. Ahsahta Press (2016). The first two sheets of Jennifer Nelson’s Civilization Makes Me Lonely act as a palimpsest. Translucent paper covers Ahsahta Press’ emblem,…
_____1_____ compression. To use a kind of compression, so compressed that the links between the image/phrase break down, but the whole poem still retains its connection. inter-text. Using and repeating…
Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Suzette Mayr. Coach House Books (2017). It isn’t often we get to pair “campus novel” with “psychedelic,” yet here we are.…
![Joshua Whitehead: Can You Be My Fulltime Daddy: White&Gold[Questionmark]](https://lemonhound.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/LH-joshpic-4-indiginegative-crop-754x566.jpg)
CAN YOU BE MY FULLTIME DADDY: WHITE&GOLD[QUESTIONMARK] : :: :: : : :::::: : : :: : : : :installingmusicsoftware: : :: :::: : : :: ::borntodierecordinstalled: :: : :…
Welcome! I’ve been chomping at the bit to get this first volume out to you—so much so that several parts of the whole slipped out of the kennel a little…
Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew-Bose, HarperCollins Canada (2017) “I have no pen…and not much to say, or rather too much and not the mood,” wrote Virginia Woolf…
The Service Porch, Fred Moten, Letter Machine Editions (2016). See, I’m extended contraband and longtime release pharmaceutical gift to the english department. “uc santa barbara and crenshaw follies” grammar…
Most people seem to be using appropriation when they include a Native character in their story. One of the people who was accused of appropriation in the 1980s was the…
LOVE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS he told me he was into natives, but he couldn’t love the traumas hidden in my breathing. how do you tell a ghost that It’s…
The Haisla measure of intelligence is slightly different from that of mainstream culture. Three main indicators are an ability to trace your family roots back to mythic times, not having…
THE LIGHT OF IS IS: ON ANGER The “recalibration theory of anger” posits that anger is developed through the process of natural selection as an effective bargaining tool Or, anger…
THAT INSTRUMENT OF LAUGHTER Nowadays I like to say cool Cool cool thrashing my tongue like iguana before even a li’l wind ruffle my branch. Because that was the dark,…
How Poems Work Rob Budde on Ken Belford’s “Slick Reckoning” In the poem there are no forbidden gaps. What is added & what is replaced fills the lattice spacing of…
IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, THE WORLD IS FORMED Then undone, undid, undo. Into you’ll see until. No till nor record keeping, no tock unbinding. No backward grandfather clock unearthing. All…
I believe in domains of existence vivid and compelling beyond even this miraculous reality we call the world.[i] – Steve Venright Canadian poet, pataphysician, and psychonaut Steve Venright has been…
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud, W.W. Norton, 2017 Reviewed by Kim Fu Julia Robinson, the protagonist of Claire Messud’s latest novel The Burning Girl, is a study in privilege…
MANIFESTO For Kate Block Schiaparelli with a shoe: Prada with a cigar? In scandalous blouse and bonnet, Picasso’s Dora Maar blossoming as a shoe or bicycle? Schiap’s…
a, A Novel, Derek Beaulieu. Jean Boîte Éditions (2017). As the first entry in Jean Boîte Éditions’ new series of Uncreative Writing, Derek Beaulieu’s lengthy erasure poem a, A Novel…
The Applicant First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a…
Like poison oak or the Left Eye part in “Waterfalls” you become a little bit of everything you brush against. Today I am a handful of raisins and abt 15…
Sometimes what feels risky to me might seem quite guarded to readers. –Durga Chew-Bose Tess Liem: In your writing, especially in “Heart Museum,” you use repetition to create rhythm and…
For Lemon Hound 3.0.1’s first Open Call, we received hundreds of incredible submissions. After two years of hiatus, it’s no surprise that we returned to a poetry community that was…
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PLEASE HANG UP Mangos are the ripest weapons on hand. You ask me what I’ve wanted the longest and I say a mate whose jugular I…
////////\///////// In a painting I never drew, an autumn forest awaits discovery under a torrent of tiny strokes, each an impression of my left thumb. The forest, a forest of…
BLOOM Scraped into shallow, almost hostile questions of spring, girl feels the full girlishness of her being flood in. The first tulip discovering its great head. Girl falls into the…
I BUILT A PLAYGROUND I built a playground where you can be alone, like you like to be. And I know how you like to play games about time,…
WONDER Whom will we worship? With which weekly show? Wonder Woman TM! When will viewers bow down? Wednesdays! Which warrior wins network renown? Wonder Woman TM! Why will viewers bow…
CHARGER 10 Click slideshow to advance. ______ Margaret Christakos is a Canadian poet from Sudbury, Ontario, who has lived in Toronto since 1987. Recent books include Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss…
LXXIX Googling “white peopling,” I stumbledupon proverbial anchor babies in Urban Dictionary. UD should call me queenpin for I pwn thespian terminology. The attitude my verse asdfghjkls is sonetic: phonetics…
APPLICATION FOR CANONIZATION I hereby request to be canonized in the Holy Church of Love. A man swore eternal love, but his love was hell on earth. I have…
CRANIA AMERICANA The Caucasian skull is large and oval, with well-proportioned features. The nasal bones are arched, the chin full, the teeth vertical. This race is distinguished for the facility…
One afternoon, after finishing a cup of coffee in her living room, Greta discovered how to unstitch herself. Her clothes, skin, and hair fell from her like the peeled rind…
RISK, ON AND SCREEN OFF At 15, when I first watched My Own Private Idaho, my sexuality was still a fetal idea. But even though there are few women in…
the gramsci monument if the projects become a project from outside then the projects been a project forever. held in the projects we the project they stole. we steal the…
TROPICO I buy a game for the computer in the family room. The game is a simulation game, I buy it full-price at a game store, not for 50% off…
Excerpted from Admission Requirements by Phoebe Wang. Copyright © 2017 Phoebe Wang. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with…
SEX AT THIRTY-ONE Here’s hunger’s sweet spot, extra dough, and a summary of my competencies, is what I thought the year would be. Under its canopy, I vowed to string…
Towards a Poetics of the Dow (excerpt) Everyday has a number attached to it. Great additions, subtractions. This is not just an aesthetic problem (see Ashbery). There is a “natural…
We’re getting together content for a full slate of fall issues, but we can’t review, or choose a poem of the week from your book unless we have copies. We’ll…
ORIGIN STORY Some of it was probably cozy and nice. Close to the fire, silly drunk on sweet fermented plums. Some of it was urgent. One last romp before the…
What a vision is. Of course it is not all to do with pleasure, let alone the composition of your genitals, Fluids forming a confluence of energy and sleep, predator…
I wrote about this story, indirectly, a while back. Here’s an excerpt: A new story by Alice Munro in the current New Yorker had the Hound up part of the…
We have a few treats lined up for you. Our first call for work coming soon. #repost #starpower #neverdie #leapforyou #yesmaam #poetry #prose #entre #othet #nohands #montreal #kisses A…
Click on poem to advance. [Show picture list] from Xiphoid Process, Anansi 2017
Lemon Hound 3.0 will start posting this fall. Publishers please get your catalogs in. Details in the contact page. Once we’re up and running we’ll have calls out with links…
These last few months have been difficult, knowing that Lemon Hound would be ending, not quite believing it. I’ve been torn between wanting–as has been my feeling from the beginning–to…
Where is the body in the poem? This is a question I have been asking a lot lately, and will continue to ask as I embark on a collection of…
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…
Nature, what is nature? What is eco? What is eco-poetics? What is nature-eco-poetics? How does feminism fit into nature eco poetics? What would a Vendana Shiva/Donna Haraway hybrid look like?…
“The gatekeepers of literary culture—at least at magazines—are still primarily male.” If these gatekeepers are showing a gender bias, there’s not much room to make it up later. …
“Tag” is a poem in two parts and a rare example of a non-linear poem in the pages of the New Yorker. One section, “This,” begins with what appears to…
You know, there just aren’t enough geeks in the world! Certainly not in the poetry world (well there are geeks, they just don’t know they’re geeks). So, here’s one of…
Sue Sinclair has published four books of poetry, all of which have been nominated for awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Gerald Lampert Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her…
Review by Fazeela Jiwa Maged Zaher’s Thank You for the Window Office, feels like a cozy cringe. A cringe because the poem etches an encompassing sense of disillusionment against the…
(Title, followed by artist bio) “When the Saints Go Marching In” a novel by: Anthony Bidulka has been an accountant, a teacher, and a cook. He is a world traveller…
No Language is Neutral BY DIONNE BRAND In another place, not here, a woman might touch something between beauty and nowhere, back there and here, might pass hand over hand…
Coin BY ALBERT GOLDBARTH When the surgeons slit into my father they went to Jupiter they went so far, to a barren red moon of Jupiter’s. I’d never been there.…
As of September 26, 2017 As of July 2017 A Swarm of Bees in High Court, Tonya M. Foster, belladonna 2015 Cancer Angel, Beth Murray, belladonna 2015 Gates & Fields,…
The Mystery Shopping Cart, Porcupine’s Quill 2013 The Pigheaded Soul, Jason Guriel, Porcupine’s Quill, 2013 Career Limiting Moves, Zachariah Wells, biblioasis 2013 Several books of poetry criticism were published in…
10:06, Ben Lerner, I had to pull myself away to get this done. If you loved Leaving Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) you’ll love this. A Man In Love, Karl…