20 Poetry Collections You May Have Missed in 2020
by Jaclyn Desforges
I didn’t read much in 2020, unless doom scrolling through my newsfeed counts. It’s kind of weird, actually, because on top of the fact that I do it for work, reading has always been my escape. You’d think it would be a good choice of activity in a crisis, especially one that involves a lot of waiting indoors. But around the time my daughter’s school shut down and we started sanitizing our grocery bags, my ability to lose myself in a book seemed to dissolve. Before long, I couldn’t even handle watching anything deeper than Rick And Morty on TV. It felt too important to stay alert, scanning the headlines, as if it were only the power of my own personal attention keeping the sky up.
More than a year into this thing, I’m finally starting to emerge from my anxiety, if not from my actual house. I’m catching up on my reading, which means looking back at last year’s poetry collections – books that were written in the before-times and published in the after. They’re rooted in the poetics of a world we’ve left behind. And yet, published against the backdrop of this global pandemic, the themes within these works radiate even more brightly: belonging, geographies, intergenerational trauma, climate disaster, queerness, racialization, cephalopods and cyborgs. These collections are relics of an extraordinary year. They’re books to sink into, even if we have to scurry back to the headlines right afterwards.
The Response of Weeds. Bertrand Bickeresteth. NeWest Press. $18.95, 88 pp., ISBN: 978-1-988732-79-4
1. The Response Of Weeds by Bertrand Bickersteth, NeWest Press, April 2020
“Bertrand Bickersteth’s debut poetry collection explores what it means to be Black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province’s character and provides personal perspectives on the question of Black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is Black identity here on this paradoxical land, too.”
Born in Sierra Leone, Bertrand Bickersteth grew up in Edmonton, Calgary, and Olds, Alberta. After an English degree at UBC, Bertrand continued studying in the U.K. and later taught in the U.S. A return to Alberta provided him with new insights on Black identity and most of his writing has been committed to these perspectives ever since. Although he writes in several genres, anticlimactically, the topic is always the same: what does it mean to be Black and from the prairies? He has also given many public talks including a TED Talk for BowValleyCollegeTEDx called The Weight of Words. His poetry has appeared in several publications, including most recently The Antigonish Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Fieldstone Review. He has also been published in The Great Black North and the forthcoming anthology The Black Prairie Archives (2020). In 2018, he was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and writes everywhere.
The Saddle Hurts, Too. Breezy. Metatron Press. $18.00, 104 pp., ISBN: 978-1-988355-23-8
2. The Saddle Hurts, Too by Breezy, Metatron Press, October 2020
“The Saddle Hurts, Too is a poetic excavation through the grit and grime of personal and intergenerational history. A hybrid text of essays, prose and poetry, this collection explores what stands in the way of belonging, exposing what hides beneath anger, guilt and shame. Breezy's debut challenges us to reconsider our responsibility to ourselves, to time, to nature, and to one another. Even something that helps carry us and offers us support – a saddle, for instance – can be uncomfortable, painful even, excruciating. With this burden, Breezy writes towards joy, movement, safety and healing. In effect, The Saddle Hurts, Too reveals an experiment in thinking that attempts to break free from isolation and bind one unconditionally to unions of ritual, kinship and belonging.”
Breezy is a queer settler/Métis writer, artist and art educator. Breezy holds an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education focused on trauma-informed teaching practices. She has worked with creative violence prevention, restorative justice and arts-based enrichment programming in schools. She currently works as an educational consultant, helping others connect, heal, find joy and grow through making.
The Dyzgraphxst. Canisia Lubrin. McClelland & Stewart. $21.00, 176 pp., ISBN: 978-0-771048-69-2
3. The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin, McClelland & Stewart, March 2020
“The Dyzgraphxst presents seven inquiries into selfhood through the perennial figure Jejune. Polyvocal in register, the book moves to mine meanings of kinship through the wide and intimate reach of language across geographies and generations. Against the contemporary backdrop of intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster, the figure Jejune asks, how have I come to make home out of unrecognizability. Marked by and through diasporic life, Jejune declares, ‘I was not myself. I am not myself. My self resembles something having nothing to do with me’.”
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University. Lubrin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
Gold Rush. Claire Caldwell. Invisible Publishing. $17.95, 80 pp., ISBN: 978-1-988784-46-5
4. Gold Rush by Claire Caldwell, Invisible Publishing, April 2020
“From the Klondike to an all-girls summer camp to the frontier of outer space, Gold Rush explores what it means to be a settler woman in the wilderness. Drawing on and subverting portrayals of nature from Susanna Moodie to Cheryl Strayed, Caldwell’s poems examine the tension between the violence and empowerment women have often sought and found in wild places; this is the violence young girls inflict on each other; colonial violence perpetrated by white, settler women; violence against nature itself. Many of these poems portray a climate in crisis, suggesting that even wilderness buffs are complicit in climate change. Whether they’re trekking the Chilkoot Trail, exploring the frontiers of their own bodies and desires, or navigating an unstable, unfamiliar climate, the girls and women in these poems are pioneers – in all the complexities contained by the term.”
Claire Caldwell is a writer, a children’s book editor at Annick Press, and a kids’ writing workshop facilitator. Her debut poetry collection, Invasive Species (Wolsak and Wynn), was named one of The National Post’s top five poetry books of 2014. Claire was a 2016 writer in residence at the Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, and the 2013 winner of The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize. She has an MFA from the University of Guelph. Claire lives in Toronto.
OO: Typewriter Poems. Dani Spinosa. Invisible Publishing. $21.95, 88 pp., ISBN: 978-1-988784-47-2
5. OO: Typewriter Poems by Dani Spinosa, Invisible Publishing, april 2020
“OO: Typewriter Poems is a book of vispo (visual poetry) glosas (a Spanish poetic form that pays tribute to another poet by incorporating their lines) designed to begin to dismantle the masculinist legacy of avant-garde visual poetics. Avant-garde visual poetics has long been interested in a vanguardism designed to push the genre further using technological advances, and hidden in this vanguardism is a deeply communal, deeply feminist poetics of derivation, homage, and love. OO takes up this communal poetics. The visual poems in this collection merge analog technology (the typewriter) with digital alteration designed to look back, not forward. At once paying homage to the long history of visual poetics and critiquing the progressivist and masculinist ideals that continue to inform the genre, the poems in OO quote uncited lines from visual and concrete poems by some of the major figures of visual poetics (bpNichol, John Riddell, Bob Cobbing) as well as several under-read and understudied female visual poets (Cia Rinne, Mirella Bentivoglio, Paula Claire).”
Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media, an on-again-off-again precarious professor, the managing editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, a feminist experimental micro-press. She has published three poetry chapbooks with No Press (Glosas for Tired Eyes, Chant Uhm, and Incessantly) and one with above/ground press (Glosas for Tired Eyes Vol. 2) and her first scholarly manuscript, Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry was published by the University of Alberta Press (Spring 2018). She can be found online at www.genericpronoun.com and in person in Toronto.
Mythical Man. David Ly. Palimpsest Press. $18.95, 70 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989287-35-4
6. Mythical Man by David Ly, Palimpsest Press, April 2020
“In Mythical Man, David Ly builds, and then tears down, an army of men in a quest to explore personhood in the 21st century. Tenderness, toxic masculinity, nuances of queer love, and questions of race and identity mix in Ly’s poetry, casting a spell that enters like “a warm tongue on a first date.” Mythical Man is an authentic and accomplished debut.”
David Ly is a poet from Vancouver, BC. He graduated SFU with a BA in World Literature, English, and Creative Writing and a Master of Publishing. He is the author of the chapbook Stubble Burn (2018). His poetry has also appeared in publications such as PRISM international, The Puritan, carte blanche, Pulp Literature, The Maynard, Plenitude, and The /tƐmz/ Review. He has been longlisted for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Poetry and shortlisted for the Magpie Award in Poetry. Mythical Man is David’s first full-length collection. Twitter @dlylyly.
knot body. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch. Metatron Press. $17.00, 108 pp., ISBN: 978-1-988355-21-4
7. knot body by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Metatron Press, October 2020
“Bringing together poetry, essay and letters to ‘lovers, friends and in-betweens,’ Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.”
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre’s ‘Centering Ourselves’ BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram @theonlyelitareq.
Double Self-Portrait. James Lindsay. Buckrider Books, $18.00, 112 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989496-07-7
8. Double Self-Portrait by James Lindsay, Buckrider Books, August 2020
“Double Self-Portrait explores doubling and reproduction in art, memory, culture, nostalgia and fatherhood. Divided by four longer, more autobiographical poems, Double Self-Portrait is a deeply layered collection, one that at times speaks directly to the reader and at other times is meta-textual. Bees, cicadas, music and photography swirl through these poems, bounded as they are by the resistance to and embracing of responsibility. This is a collection where the poems work individually and together, subtly building toward a single theme that slowly coalesces during the reading to create a collection that resonates in your mind long after the book is closed.”
James Lindsay is the author of Our Inland Sea and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! He is the co-founder of Pleasence Records and works in book publishing. He lives in Toronto.
it was never going to be okay. jaye simpson. Harbour Publishing, $18.95, 112 pp., ISBN: 978-0889713-82-6
9. it was never going to be okay by jaye simpson, Nightwood Editions, September 2020
“it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry.”
jaye simpson is a Two-Spirit Oji-Cree person of the Buffalo Clan with roots in Sapotaweyak and Skownan Cree Nation who often writes about being queer in the child welfare system, as well as being queer and Indigenous. simpson’s work has been performed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (2017) in Peterborough, and in Guelph with the Vancouver Slam Poetry 2018 Team. simpson has recently been named the Vancouver Champion for the Women of the World Poetry Slam and their work has been featured in Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Mag, GUTS Magazine and Room. simpson resides on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), səlilwəta’Ɂɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations peoples, currently and colonially known as Vancouver, BC.
No Grave for This Place. Judy Quinn, trans. Donald Winkler. Signal Editions, $17.95, 72 pp., ISBN: 978-1-550655-56-8
10. No Grave for This Place by Judy Quinn, trans. Donald Winkler, Signal Editions, September 2020
“A rogue moose wanders into a suburb near Quebec city, tramples lawns and gardens, stumbles in and out of a swimming pool, is tracked by three gun toting heads of family who shoot it down just as a school bus goes by wherein a little girl is trilling ‘Three Little Kittens.’ Thus begins No Grave For This Place, Judy Quinn’s bleak, ironic and at times darkly comic tribute to Auberivière, the neighbourhood where she grew up. Here ‘streets are landing strips / for planes that will never arrive,’ the dead ‘descend / the steps of prefab houses / champagne flutes in their hands,’ and a pack of cats ‘throws itself on the electric fences / surrounding our inner lives.’ Quinn’s voice will resonate with all those who have, by association or from experience, tasted the cultural barrenness that can underlie civilized life.”
Judy Quinn was born in 1974, in Quebec City. She has published three novels and four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Pas de tombeau pour les lieux (No Grave For This Place), was a finalist for the Prix Alain-Grandbois, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-language poetry.
Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based literary translator of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French to English translation, most recently for Pierre Nepveu’s The Major Verbs in 2013.
Devolution. Kim Goldberg. Caitlin Press Inc., $18.00, 96 pp., ISBN: 978-177386-026-8
11. Devolution by Kim Goldberg, Caitlin Press Inc., February 2020
“Devolution is Kim Goldberg’s eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldberg’s canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.”
Kim Goldberg is the author of eight books of poetry and nonfiction. Her surreal and absurdist poems and fables have appeared in magazines and anthologies in North America and abroad. Her first poetry collection, Ride Backwards on Dragon, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Red Zone, a collection of poems on urban homelessness, has been taught in university literature courses. In 2016 she released Undetectable, her haibun journey through a lifetime of Hepatitis C. Her earlier nonfiction books were published by New Star Books and Harbour Publishing. Kim holds a degree in biology from the University of Oregon and is an avid bird-watcher and field naturalist. Before turning to poetry, she was a freelance journalist covering environmental issues in publications such as Canadian Geographic, Nature Canada, This Magazine, Georgia Straight, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, BBC Wildlife Magazine and numerous other magazines in Canada and abroad. Originally from Oregon, Kim and her family came to Canada in the 1970s as Vietnam War resisters. She lives on unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC), where she is known for creating poem galleries in vacant storefronts and staging guerrilla poetry happenings in weedy waysides.
The Only Card in the Deck of Knives. Lauren Turner. Wolsak & Wynn, $18.00, 112 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989496-09-1
12. The Only Card in a Deck of Knives by Lauren Turner, Buckrider Books, August 2020
“The Only Card in a Deck of Knives is a groundbreaking new collection in the area of sickness poetry. Within these poems, Lauren Turner aims to reclaim the ‘hysterical’ label given to sick women throughout history. Rather than shying away from the emotional urgency and raw vulnerability surrounding a terminal diagnosis, Turner shines an interrogative light upon it. These fierce poems are written from the perspective of a twentysomething female speaker with a terminal disease, a speaker who is preoccupied with maintaining the illusion of health, but then refers to herself as ‘dying’ in the next line. Fascinated and repelled by the societal impulse to gussy up diseases that take violent, and sometimes deadly, tolls upon women’s bodies, Turner uses these lyric poems to juxtapose the violence of a gendered illness with the violence encountered by women and non-binary people in society. The Only Card in a Deck of Knives unpacks society’s impulse to pull away from sick women and examines why we discredit their professed pain, symptoms and emotions.”
Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist, who wrote the chapbook, We're Not Going to Do Better Next Time (knife | fork | book, 2018). Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, canthius and elsewhere. She won the 2018 Short Grain Contest and was a finalist for the 2017 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.
The Cyborg Anthology. Lindsay B-E. Brick Books, $20.00, 96 pp., ISBN: 978-177131-530-2
13. The Cyborg Anthology by Lindsay B-e, Brick Books, October 2020
“The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, but a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life. The book is organized like a typical anthology of literature, split into sections that include a biography of each poet and a sample of their poetry. It covers early Cyborg poetry, political, celebrity, and pop culture poets, and ends with the next generation of Cyborg poets.
The narrative takes place in the time after a cataclysmic event, and the collection wrestles with this loss. Through the lives of the poets, the book chronicles the history of personhood for technological beings, their struggle for liberation, and demonstrates different ways a person can be Cyborg. The poems and biographies together tell the story of a complex and enthralling world-to-come, exploring topics that are important in the future, and also urgent right now.”
Lindsay B-e is a writer and filmmaker from Clavet, SK currently living in Toronto. They have a BA in English, a BFA in Filmmaking, a Certificate in Poetry from The Writer’s Studio at SFU, and are completing a Novel-Writing Certificate from U of T Continuing Studies. Their writing has appeared in Poetry Is Dead, the League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, Geez Magazine, Peach Mag, emerge: The Writer’s Studio Anthology, and a chapbook from bird, buried press. Lindsay is married with two kids, two dogs, and two cats. They can be found online at biseenscene.com.
Nautilus and Bone. Lisa Richter. Frontenac House, $19.95, 112 pp., ISBN: 978-1989466-12-4
14. Nautilus and Bone by Lisa Richter, Frontenac House, January 2020
“Nautilus and Bone chronicles the life and work of the radical, passionate Russian-Jewish American poet Anna Margolin on her path toward self-determination. Blending myth, surrealism, historical fact and fiction, this collection of persona poems brings to life one of the most celebrated Yiddish poets of her generation. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry.”
Lisa Richter is the author of the poetry collection Closer to Where We Began (Tightrope Books, 2017), and a chapbook, Intertextual. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Exile, The Literary Review of Canada, The Puritan, and Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (Wolsak and Wynn, 2020). She lives, writes, and works as an English as a Second Language teacher in Toronto.
Spawn. Marie-Andrée Gill, trans. Kristen Renee Miller. Book*hug Press, $18.00, 89 pp., ISBN: 978-1771665-97-1
15. Spawn by Marie-Andrée Gill, trans. Kristen Renee Miller, Book*Hug Press, april 2020
“Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Gill’s poems ask how one can reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers. The poet’s young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers’ names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and nineties-kid culture, Spawn is threaded with the speaker’s desires, her searching: for fresh water to ‘takes the edge off,’ for a ‘habitable word,’ for sex. For her true north—her voice and her identity. Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker’s journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to make of herself.”
Marie-Andrée Gill is Pekuakamishkueu and the author of three books: Béante, Frayer (published in English as Spawn, Book*hug Press), and Chauffer le dehors (English translation forthcoming from Book*hug Press). She is the recipient of two Indigenous Voices Award. She lives in L’Anse-Saint-Jean, Quebec.
Kristen Renee Miller’s poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Common, Guernica, and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of Spawn (Book*hug, 2020), by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Literary Translators Association, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande.
Washes, Prays. Noor Naga. McClelland & Stewart. $19.95, 80 pp., ISBN: 978-07710-0589-3
16. Washes, Prays by Noor Naga, McClelland & Stewart, March 2020
“RBC Bronwen Wallace Award winner Noor Naga's bracing debut, a novel-in-verse about a young woman's romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith. Coocoo is a young immigrant woman in Toronto. Her faith is worn threadbare after years of bargaining with God to end her loneliness and receiving no answer. Then she meets her mirror-image; Muhammad is a professor and father of two. He's also married. Heartbreaking and hilarious, this verse-novel chronicles Coocoo's spiraling descent: the transformation of her love into something at first desperate and obsessive, then finally cringing and animal, utterly without grace. Her best friend, Nouf, remains by her side throughout, and together they face the growing contradictions of Coocoo's life. What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets? These are some of the questions this verse-novel swishes around in its mouth.”
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Alexandria. She is the winner of the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award, the 2019 Disquiet Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Graywolf Press Africa Prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, The Walrus, The Common, The Sultan's Seal, POETRY, and more. Her debut novel American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in Fall 2021.
Cephalopography 2.0. Rasiqra Revulva. Buckrider Books, $20.00, 104 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989496-08-4
17. Cephalopography 2.0 by Rasiqra Revulva, Buckrider Books, August 2020
“Cephalopography 2.0 is as much a passionate celebration of cephalopods in all their plurality and finery as it is a collection of poems exploring human identity and experience through the lens of these marine animals. These experiments with traditional poetic forms such as ghazals, tankas and cinquains, as well as more contemporary forms, make poems that are uniquely and beautifully composed. Cephalopography 2.0 plunges into the depths of human experience to daringly remark on the wild and transformative links between cephalopods and humanity beyond the land and the sea.”
Rasiqra Revulva is a queer femme writer, multimedia artist, editor, musician, performer and SciComm advocate. She is an editor of the climate crisis anthology Watch Your Head: A Call to Action, and one half of the experimental electronic duo The Databats (Slice Records, Melbourne; Toronto). She has published two chapbooks of glitch-illustrated poetry: Cephalopography (words(on)pages press, 2016) and If You Forget the Whipped Cream, You’re No Good As A Woman (Gap Riot Press, 2018). Cephalopography 2.0 is her debut collection. Learn more at @rasiqra_revulva, @thedatabats and www.rasiqrarevulva.com (http://rasiqrarevulva.com/).
The Outer Wards. Sadiqa de Meijer. Véhicule Press/Signal Editions, $17.95, 88 pp., ISBN: 978-1550655-45-2
18. The Outer Wards by Sadiqa de Meijer, Véhicule Press/Signal Editions, april 2020
“The Outer Wards, Sadiqa de Meijer’s new collection, explores questions of maternal love and duty—and the powerlessness that comes with the disruption of that role through illness. ‘I was awake. / The hour was wrong,’ de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls ‘my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable,’ The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words—their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.”
Sadiqa de Meijer’s debut collection, Leaving Howe Island, was a nominee for the 2014 Governor General's Award for English-language poetry and for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. Her forthcoming book, alfabet / alphabet, will be published with Palimpsest Press in September 2020. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario.
The Burden of Gravity. Shannon McConnell. Caitlin Press Inc., $18.00, 104 pp., ISBN: 978-1-77386-028-2
19. The Burden of Gravity by Shannon McConnell, Caitlin Press Inc., october 2020
“In this haunting and disarming debut, McConnell recalls a dark time in BC’s history to give poetic voice to the many forgotten residents of the infamous Woodlands School.
In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminster’s Woodlands School, a former ‘lunatic asylum’ opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine residents’ lives, giving voice to those who were unable to speak for themselves, to shift focus from the institutional authority to the experience of residents. As poetry of witness, the collection uses a grounding tone to excavate the individual experiences through traditional narrative, ekphrastic and experimental erasure forms that elicit an array of emotions, from heartbreak to anger. Drawn from archival research, The Burden of Gravity, challenges readers to consider how we, in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization, choose to remember institutions like Woodlands School.”
Shannon McConnell is a writer, educator and musician originally from Vancouver, BC. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in untethered, The Fieldstone Review, Louden Singletree, In Medias Res, Rat’s Ass Review, The Anti-Languorous Project, and more. She holds degrees in English Literature and Education from the University of the Fraser Valley and Simon Fraser University, respectively, and is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in Writing program. In 2018, she won second place for the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award for Poetry. She finished an MA in History at the University of Saskatchewan in 2020 and is now pursuing her PhD at Queens University in Kingston, ON.
Everyone at This Party. Tanja Bartel. Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, $19.95, 80 pp., ISBN: 978-177310-125-5
20. Everyone At This Party by Tanja Bartel, Goose Lane/icehouse poetry, april 2020
“In Tanja Bartel’s riveting poetry debut, the bucolic Vancouver suburbs clash with the interpersonal. The reader dips into the lives of individuals whose day-to-day is anything but peaceful, altered by luck and choice, fear and failure. In poems that light upon themes such as regret, guilt, and human empathy, Bartel highlights the arbitrary nature of life and the demons that persist within.”
Tanja Bartel holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous venues including Geist, the Antigonish Review, and the American Journal of Medical Genetics. She lives in Pitt Meadows, BC.
Jaclyn Desforges is the author of a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), and a forthcoming poetry collection with Palimpsest Press. Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices award, the 2019 Hamilton Public Library Freda Waldon Award for Fiction, the 2019 Judy Marsales Real Estate Ltd. Award for Poetry, and a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing. Her first chapbook, Hello Nice Man, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019. Jaclyn’s writing has been featured in Room Magazine, THIS Magazine, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Contemporary Verse 2, Minola Review and others. Jaclyn is currently writing a collection of short fiction with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. She is an MFA candidate in the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.
Follow Jaclyn on Twitter @jaclyndesforges and on Instagram @jaclyndesforges