At My Strongest When I Wander: An Interview with Annick MacAskill
September 11, 2025
“In general, for me, poetry is about paying attention, which is itself a devotional practice.”
ben robinson interviews annick macaskill about her poetry collection, Votive.
Annick MacAskill is the author of four books of poetry, including Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), winner of the Governor General’s Award, and Votive (Gaspereau Press, 2024), which was recently shortlisted for the Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. MacAskill’s poems have appeared in journals across Canada and abroad and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series. She is also the founder and publisher of Opaat Press. MacAskill lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.
From the publisher:
Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”
BR: To start things off, I’m curious about how you knew Votive was done? Were you at all concerned that there were more Votive poems floating around, just out of grasp? It seems across your four books now, that they are getting shorter and shorter. Is this a conscious effort toward concision/compression/concentration or perhaps related more to each book’s particular material/character? I’m thinking of all those Modernist (chap)books here, the Sapphic fragment.
AM: It’s never easy for me to say when a collection is done. Eventually, there’s just a feeling of doneness, as well as a bit of trust.
There are already more “Votive”s floating around; the three sonnets titled “Votive” in this collection are just the ones that worked for now. They punctuate the book where I might otherwise have section breaks. Doing away with section breaks in this book was a conscious decision, though one I made relatively late in the process—as was the relatively short length. Shadow Blight, my third book, is by far the shortest of my full-length collections, and I wanted to stay somewhere in that ballpark for Votive. These decisions were guided by my sense of the kind of reading experience I wanted to offer to the reader. There’s no clearly defined theme or narrative to this book, but there is, I hope, a mood. And in general, I prefer a shorter book of poetry to a lengthier one.
BR: In-line with its succinctness, Votive has the quality of a devotional, of brief texts to meditate on. Like your previous work, I see the presence of religious tradition and language here, rituals, but enacted to different (new?) ends. In “Sinéad O’Connor Catholic” you describe your “lopsided penchant for all that ornamentation” and I’m wondering if you can speak to the shifting place of religious practice, particularly Catholic tradition across your collections? How might your study of French literature relate to the presence of Catholicism in your work?
AM: My research into sixteenth-century French literature allowed me to pursue my interest in Catholic devotion as a kind of cultural practice. I wrote my dissertation and published a few articles on the work of Anne de Marquets, a nun who translated and wrote poetry during the French Wars of Religion. My relationship to faith and religious practice remains a complicated one, but something about this literary historical research meant I could spend time with my curiosities in a different, in many ways easier, way.
In addition to this, much of my poetry, and indeed, much of the poetry I like to read, takes the form you describe—“brief texts to meditate on”—while engaging in other traditions as well. In general, for me, poetry is about paying attention, which is itself a devotional practice.
BR: In much of Votive, I see both a present and past you attempting to piece together a workable worldview from the options at hand. I like what you said above about devotion and I’m wondering if, given your engagement with Greek translation in this collection as well, you see a difference between this French Catholic sense of devotion and a more classical Greek devotion? At the risk of being reductive of these two multifaceted cultures, how do you see these sensibilities interacting in Votive?
AM: I agree about this seeking for what you call a “workable worldview”—and I suppose I still am seeking.
It’s very difficult, as you imply, to compare/contrast these two broader “traditions.” And the ways I engage with them, in this book, are very different.
Christian (and particularly Catholic) devotion is a feeling I can’t quite describe. I’ve felt it most potently in some of the less famous churches I’ve visited in France. It is at once beautiful and oppressive.
The Greek devotion? I suppose you mean Sappho—and she is singular. The specificity of this source material, meaning Sappho’s poetry and the mythology around her life (we truly know so little about her), is what interests me. Votive contains two translations I did (of her fragments 16 and 168b), as well as a handful of poems that allude to her and her work. Here, the devotion is one of desire, of love, of wanting.
BR: In line with this workable worldview, we encounter your speaker, in the present, taking stock of their girlhood and adolescence, piecing together “A History” from digital and material traces: Grade 2 memories, DNA, adolescent skin care concoctions, first communions. Was this turn to the past, and particularly your education, in Votive part of a conscious reassessment or something more organic? What drew you to write about this particular period of your life for this collection?
AM: This was never a themed collection for me. Votive is an assemblage of poems I wrote over a decade. Some of the poems pre-date the publication of my first collection, No Meeting Without Body, which is itself unthemed. After Murmurations and Shadow Blight, both of which are definitely more united by both subject matter and narrative, I knew I wanted to put out another collection collection, another book that was more of a gathering than a project. Eventually, of course, the book had to be united by something—hence this through-line of devotion, a concept I interpret rather broadly, as well as, I think, a certain tone or atmosphere.
I've realized that I'm at my strongest and happiest as a writer when I let my mind wander. To answer your question, no, I was not so consciously focused on understanding or re-assessing my childhood, rather I was tackling the subject matter as it came. The poems you allude to were written over a number of years, some seemingly far away from each other, though of course, a fruitful exploration into a given topic or memory will often crack me open, propelling me to write more.
BR: Yes, I find it so fascinating to see what comes of the wandering, what cracks one open, as you say. Another seeming source of unity in this collection, and I think in line with some our discussion around this search for a worldview or tradition, is the presence of iconic women poets (saints or gods, depending on your tradition), of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Sylvia Plath, Karen Solie, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Margaret Laurence, Louise Glück, whether through epigraphs, or as more explicit starting/ending points in the glosas. Can you say a bit about why it felt important to have these writers present in the book, and maybe what a few of them mean/have meant to you?
AM: This is another constant in all my collections—allusions to or direct interactions with other writers. Again, not so much a conscious decision as something that happens as I write. I wasn’t initially seeking to say anything in particular with these citations, which isn’t to say the choices aren’t significant.
Like most writers, I love to read. Books have always been a big part of my life. The poets you list—all of them have accompanied me, in one way or another. I want to cite them to render homage, and also because, quite simply, I’m just thinking about them.
Perhaps to be a bit more specific about at least some of this... I have four glosas in Votive, which was a bit of a departure for me. I had only ever published one before this: “Unbending,” which takes its four lines from Louise Labé (in my translation). I had a bit of success trying out the glosa form a couple springs ago, managing to settle into a rhythm and write four pieces I was decently satisfied with. The poets whose lines I borrow for these poems—Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, Karen Solie—are some of my best teachers. I have read them for years, and I continue to think through what their work means. I like that the glosa form allows me to put this front and centre. Regardless of how explicitly a writer might name their sources or influences, those influences exist. I'm just maybe a little more forward-facing with it.
As for Sappho—well. From reading her, learning what little there is to truly “know” about her life, and studying her reception over the years, I guess I just had a lot built up inside me that I wanted to express.
BR: I think the homage really comes through in this book and it was very interesting to see how you interacted and responded to so many of my own favourite poets.
Lastly, I’d like to ask you about perhaps a less common source of literary influence or inspiration: knitting. Across poems like “Knitting,” “A History” and “Penelope’s Shroud” we see traces of your fabric work and I’m curious how the villanelle-like repetitions of a knitting pattern have informed your poetics?
AM: Knitting and other fibre arts are a real passion of mine. My mother taught me to crochet when I was four (re-teaching me every year for several years in a row), which was also the age I learned to read. I learned to knit when I was nine. Funnily enough, writing and fibre arts like knitting, crochet, and punch needle tax my body (arms, wrists, hands, neck) in similar ways. The pain often means I have to stop before I want to. Mostly I’d love to do more of both in my life. Sometimes I feel like I have to choose.
And it’s not an easy choice. I love fibre arts, particularly knitting. It brings me a lot of joy, and allows for creative expression and concentration much in the way writing does. I do not find the (relative) repetitiveness of knitting dull; perhaps similarly, I do not find repetition in poetry dull, at least not when done right. In both cases, what we’re talking about is the elegance of a skill that can appear deceptively simple; a kind of feminist power in this, perhaps. And ultimately, I don’t know which art is influencing the other. I truly don’t. They hold similar weight to me.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth, and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, was published by ARP Books in 2024. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.