rob mclennan : an interview with Manahil Bandukwala, : Ottawa 200

, Ottawa 200

 

 

 

Manahil Bandukwala is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Ottawa Book Award, and winner of the Archibald Lampman Award) and MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022). She was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

You and I recently participated in a ‘poetry crawl’ around Centretown, organized and curated by Amanda Earl. What was your process of working Ottawa research for that particular project? What were you hoping to find?

I love poetry crawls (and all other kinds of walking tours too). As someone who only moved to Ottawa ten years ago, I’ve learned so much about Ottawa’s neighbourhoods through these types of walks, about the people who lived there and the spaces that were once community gathering points. Last year, I did Susan Johnston’s literary walking tour of Hintonburg, where I learned so much about the neighbourhood I now live in.

Susan’s tour really informed my approach to what I wanted to write, in terms of bringing to light small details that, when combined with the works of the others on the tour, show a rich fabric of Ottawa’s poetic past. What I liked about Amanda’s invitation was that there wasn’t an expectation to “find” something, but rather to go in whatever direction felt inspirational and meaningful to us as individuals.

When I learned that Priscila Uppal has been one of the few historic South Asian poets, I immediately knew what I wanted my research and writing to focus on. Uppal’s work has been influential for me in the past, and Amanda’s invitation opened up opportunities to dive deep into Uppal’s oeuvre. It was fun to read Uppal’s books with an eye for Ottawa in particular, which isn’t a way I’ve read a book of poetry before.

How did Uppal’s influence show itself? And what, specifically, about Uppal’s work do you find yourself responding to?

In the past, I’ve been taken by Uppal’s use of language, the diction and style of her writing, and how effortless her poetry feels when I read it. The four poems I wrote for the poetry crawl were all centos of entire books by Uppal, though I was attuned to references that resonated with things happening in my own life, or in the world around. Some of these books were published over twenty years ago, but references to Ottawa, to bombing in the Middle East, to quarantines and lockdowns, all felt relevant. The poems were all very specific to their time, but there’s also something to be said about their staying power and continued relevance today. 

What brought about your interest in working the cento? What do you feel it brings to or provides for your work? Do you see the form in terms of homage, jumping off point or conversation?

Lately I’ve been feeling stuck with poetry—in part because my writing attention has been towards fiction for the past two years. Whenever I’m stuck in this way, I turn to form and constraint. Around the time of Amanda’s invitation, I’d read a few centos recently that really stuck with me, including in Margo LaPierre’s Ajar and Jody Chan’s Madness Belongs to the People. I loved the specific voice their centos evoked, how they used found lines from poems often unlike their own, and fused their own voice and style into them. I had already been wanting to try out the form for myself, and as I was reading and researching, it struck me that this was the perfect opportunity to try out the form.

Have your poems, or your approach to the poems, changed at all through the process of focusing on prose?

Although a lot of my prose has been speculative, my recent poems have been a lot more grounded in realism! I think this is in part due to writing a lot of speculative poetry in Monument and Heliotropia, and now coming back to realism feels a bit full-circle. I feel like I’m in a sandbox stage with poetry right now, and am just having fun seeing what emerges without expectations to put together a chapbook or full-length manuscript.

I’m curious at the contemporary lean into speculative poetry, from Jason Christie and Lindsay Bradford (formerly Lindsay B-e) to Renée Sarojini Saklikar and Mahaila Smith. What appeals to you about working with the speculative, and how is your return to, as you say, being “grounded in realism” revealing itself?

The speculative has always felt full of possibilities, especially to those of us who have been sci-fi/fantasy fans our whole life. It opens up unexpected avenues, and what appealed to me was that, as the writer, the poem could go anywhere. I’m trying to bring that same approach into poems grounded in realism, to let them go where they want. I’m certainly open to them being speculative—that just hasn’t happened yet!

Is there a difference in the way you approach prose, compared the poem, or the poetry manuscript? Or is it simply a different shape of breath or line to the same potential list of concerns, questions and possibilities?

The writing outcome and the goals are different, but I do think my approach is ultimately very similar. I like starting in a notebook, letting ideas generate, and then shaping them from there. Prose is a much longer process, and I’ve had to learn to be okay with sitting for prose pieces for a longer period of time. At the end of the day, it’s all writing, it’s all using language and words to evoke, provoke, and play.

What prompted the focus on writing prose? Was it an extension of what you’d already been thinking across your work, or were you wishing to move into a different direction? Was there something you wished to explore that only prose, not poetry, might allow?

It was the latter—there were things I was trying to write through poetry that just weren’t coming out the way I wanted them too. A lot of Ottawa poets were working more and more on fiction around that time—Margo LaPierre, Conyer Clayton, Mahaila Smith, Frances Boyle—and in talking to them about writing craft and processes I was likewise compelled to try a new form of writing to see if the things I wanted to write about would come through better. And, they did!

Do you have a final shape in mind when working on a project, whether a poetry manuscript or fiction?

Sometimes I do, and I find those projects have, without a doubt, fizzled out. The projects that actually take form are the ones I let unravel naturally—and then I come back to them to finesse and polish. I think this probably has to do with the idea of the finished product that I build in my head, and then get frustrated early on when it’s not turning out the way I’ve built it up to be. I do think the partial projects have a role to play in building craft skills, and this is true for any artistic medium.  

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he accidentally co-owns a house across the street from where his parents were married, and spent more than twenty years running a reading series two blocks from where he was born. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), recently won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award.

Laura Kerr : an interview with Paul Woodford

 

 

 

What if language was never invented to communicate? I ask Paul Woodford from THE DEPARTMENT OF VISUAL PARADOX AND PATAPHYSICAL RESEARCH about his findings. If you believe communication is poetry, the Department has evidence to the contrary—and has yet to find a communicative use for proving it. More than that: does language exist as we perceive it, or does it take leave of the mind the moment we start reading?

Laura Kerr: Paul, what evidence would convince you that language had been invented for some entirely different purpose?

Paul Woodford: The Department, as a whole, has always considered the possibility that language was originally invented to prevent communication. I offer political rhetoric, advertising and certain forms of art criticism as supporting evidence. These forms of communication demonstrate that language can operate remarkably well while communicating remarkably little… and language used for exchanging information, perhaps represents an unfortunate technical malfunction… But what if language never did have an original purpose? What if communication was simply an accidental property discovered after language had established itself? The Department has provisionally classified meaning as a by-product of linguistic friction, particularly when words encounter other words with which they have no previous acquaintance. Poetry appears especially adept at engineering such encounters. Of course, the most convincing evidence would be a sentence that performed its original purpose perfectly while remaining entirely incomprehensible.

L: I have long admired your ability to dispense with meaningful jargon. You seem to know which words have outlived their purpose yet continue to exist. Who do you feel has jurisdiction over a meaning once it has been released into conversation?

P: The short answer is nobody. Although, the word jurisdiction assumes that meaning occupies a territory and that somebody possesses the authority to administer it… and an extraordinary number of people appear to have appointed themselves to that position. However, I think that meaning is not simply released into conversation. It is produced through an encounter. The Department regards meaning less as property than as an event that is temporarily assembled between participants. Of course, this means the Department cannot claim exclusive authority over its own findings. We have therefore declared all conclusions provisional and even this declaration itself has subsequently been challenged.

L: I have always said that the brilliant turn comes when language ceases to be a neutral instrument and becomes a struggle over power. Or perhaps it was Lewis Carroll who said it. Same difference. Which, that said, is it?

P: Humpty Dumpty understood the situation perfectly. His difficulty was mistaking an elevated position for a secure one. His authority over language depended not simply on his ability to impose meaning, but on the circumstances that allowed others to accept it… but he failed to see that his authority was dependent on the conditions that sustain it. The wall wasn’t merely somewhere to sit… it was the institutional structure supporting his linguistic ambition. With that in mind, the Department suspects that what passes for neutrality is simply an authority that has forgotten the precariousness of its position. So, one has to ask: was language ever neutral, or is neutrality the name given to assumptions that have become sufficiently established so as to escape examination? The Department’s Pataphysical Collider attempts to expose these assumptions by bringing seemingly incompatible systems of representation into collision. The resulting residues frequently contain contradictions, ironies and megabeliefs: propositions whose authority has outgrown their evidence. I think that experimental poetry can perform a similar operation by interrupting the familiar arrangements through which language acquires authority. Unfortunately, the experimental can become just as institutionalised as the conventions it challenges. Even rebellion can become grammatically correct. The Department is now investigating its own terminology and the initial findings are troubling.

L: When I was a child, we played a game called 20 Questions. Marvellously long. We made up rules and penalties, so it was a good lesson in withstanding interrogation (a useful skill by today’s standards). If every answer must take the form of a question, what constitutes a refusal to answer?

P: Wouldn’t a refusal first have to recognise the authority of the question it intended to refuse?

And if I answered with another question, would I be refusing the original or extending its jurisdiction?

Could an interrogator distinguish between an answer disguised as a question and a question disguised as an answer?

And if every question establishes the conditions under which an answer becomes permissible, who authorised the interrogator?

More importantly, Laura, when did this interview become an interrogation?

And why have I only just noticed?

L: I was pleased to learn that your Department has established that language had a life before the poet arrived. Does that mean the poet is a late arrival, an unwelcome guest, or merely someone who was mistaken for someone else?

P: The Department’s original findings suggested that the poet arrived late, was mistaken for someone else and then turned up at the wrong address. This remains the generally accepted history of authorship. I’ve always been suspicious of the romantic conception of the poet as the originating source of language. Words arrive carrying accumulated histories, conventions, prejudices and bureaucratic systems of authority that the poet neither invented nor can entirely control. The poet becomes not so much a manufacturer but more a forensic investigator, the first witness to a linguistic incident whose consequences cannot be entirely predetermined. But there is a further difficulty. If the poet’s identity is partly constructed through the reception of the work, perhaps the poet does not arrive before the poem. Perhaps the poet arrives retrospectively. The Department is investigating whether this explains the persistent absence of the author from the scene of the work.

L: I understand from your recent research that meaning has entered its crystalline phase. Should we now regard interpretation as a method of examining its structure, or do we risk altering the evidence each time we remove it from the light?

P: Crystals possess structure while remaining dependant on the conditions under which they form. If we change those conditions, other configurations become possible. Consequently, we have encountered a difficulty with the crystalline phase. The specimens appear to alter their structure according to who is examining them. Initially, we suspected the specimens… and then the observers…and now we suspect the distinction. Interpretation doesn’t simply reveal meaning. It participates in its production.

Our Division of Semantic Meteorology has been investigating the possibility that interpretation itself possesses something resembling a climate. Meanings condense under particular cultural pressures. They become stable through repetition and acquire authority through institutions and occasionally fracture when exposed to unfamiliar circumstances. This is especially apparent in networked reception, where images and texts circulates through systems that continually detach them from their original contexts. A poem encountered in a book, an exhibition, spoken word platform or a social media feed may retain its linguistic identity yet produce quite different interpretive formations. The crystalline phase then, does not represent the final solidification of meaning. It represents a condition in which meaning has become sufficiently structured to be examined and sufficiently unstable to fracture under examination. As for removing the evidence from the light, the Department would advise against it. We have discovered that the shadows it casts are an intrinsic part of the specimen.

Find more of Paul Woodford’s work on his website.

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura served as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.

rob mclennan : This Now Extends to My Daughter, by Lydia Unsworth

This Now Extends to My Daughter, Lydia Unsworth
Blue Diode Press, 2026

 

 

 

One of a pair of full-length titles that Manchester poet Lydia Unsworth has out this year—alongside Stay Awhile (Merseyside UK: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2026)—is This Now Extends to My Duaghter (Edinburgh Scotland: Blue Diode Press, 2026), a collection of deeply evocative and descriptive lyrics, offering patterns, passages and narrative quirks alongside parental wisdoms, odd observations and critical explorations into, as Rachel Curzon’s back cover blurb offers, “legacies of systems, institutions and other people.” “the hall is full of letters / telling me what I owe” begins the poem “Communications (politics),” “and offering me £10 for my time / i.e. DNA, if I’m willing / to be involved in some largest ever / exciting programme of national health research //  people are falling down the stairs / drinking themselves to death / in flats we cycle past, aided and / abetted by abusive partners / who accompany them to appointments / yet whose names evade capture / on official documents [.]”

Across enormously clever, wry and critically-savage poems, Unsworth examines living in a rental market, work and parenting through a language rich and gymnastic, thick with a play of sound and rhythm. “they are church organs / pockets of exhalation / bored effluvia / wobbly bolus / thermal little party pipes,” writes the short piece “Clam,” “floating in the dim coagulant / I open and close my mouth like a bored valve [.]” There’s almost an element that echoes the days of 1970s and 80s and 90s Vancouver poetry, specifically poets around The Kootenay School of Writing (Peter Culley, Kevin Davies, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Michael Turner, Clint Burnham, Michael Barnholden, et al), through her exploration across language through labour and elements of the working class (very different than, say, the Vancouver “work poets” of the same era: Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, et al). Through Unsworth, situated in Manchester, historically known as an industrial, working class town (also known as having one of the most vibrant and influential musical scenes in the world), the poems are situated in a lived reality, whether worrying about landlords or shopping, job interviews or general labour security, while simultaneously critiqueing and questioning, and attempting to establish one’s own agency, one’s own clarity. In many ways, Unsworth displays herself, even through her playful explorations, as a grounded, moral writer, with a narrative lyric that offers the distinctions of right and wrong. There are ways to do and approach things, certainly, and she will suffer no fools or foibles in finding her way. Listen to the opening, for example, of the poem “Shining Example,” that begins:

if you give me a job, I will execute it
    I can dehusk 100,000 seeds while the earth stays still
    I can direct express freight through a quarry
excavate nothing 

if you don’t excite yourself
you aren’t going to convince anyone
external to exalt you 

be exhilarating
make the recruiter want to examine you 

I beg to differ
to be allowed to differ

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he accidentally co-owns a house across the street from where his parents were married, and spent more than twenty years running a reading series two blocks from where he was born. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), recently won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award.

Hassen Saker : In Defence of My spectre

 

 

 

 

“Let’s burn that poem and bury it in the woods,” Seb suggested over the phone one day. Maybe a few weeks before, I’d been staying with her at her family’s place at the Jersey shore while composing the accompanying score, sitting on the edge of the lagoon’s bulkhead in their back yard. Instead, with the company of another friend, Deborah, I burned my haunted rocking chair covered in decoupaged poetry in the woods where I’d often walked off heartache. It was helpful.

Unsure if Seb’s response to spectre was coming from wanting to protect me or from embarrassment for me, my exposed vulnerability. Or maybe she just hated to see me wounded, a victim. Likely all the above. I had the sense she felt nauseated, as I first had, with the piece – and as I had during the devastating event that prompted it.

I was invited to read with a few other poets in Jacob and Charlotte’s back yard in West Philadelphia. Unsure why I was determined to present only this piece but I felt I’d no choice. I didn’t expect it to happen when I stood to perform with my freshly minted score, the slight loss of control over my limbs. Holding the pages near a floor lamp they had set up for the readers, my hands shook terribly and my knees visibly trembled. With weird fear, wobbly voice, and a dry mouth, I persisted. Then it was over and I felt released. I imagine it made people uncomfortable and I was regretful about that. And about bringing drama to a reading in my community. P.S. It wouldn’t be my last time for drama at readings.

Newsflash: it’s not unusual for poets to be drama. Don’t roll your eyes; it’s maybe beneficial. Like I used to say, “poets feel shit so that others don’t have to,” or something to that effect, presuming that good poets can somehow inject humanity back into humans. But it’s clearly true, evident in the self-proclaimed and self-important title, POET, that we choose to wrestle with a rich life of emotion – and the drama of living with an ego. My therapist would say that the use for greater depth and breadth of emotion is to plumb truths of human experience and turn them into art. I think that’s how she put it. I’m probably embellishing. Or making excuses.

Besides, most people who aren’t total psychos have roller-coaster, run-of-the-mill, terrifying and exhilarating human experiences that elicit endless eye-rolls if we pull ourselves out of the muck of the moment long enough to be annoyed with the audacity of it.

As for poets, I know a few who are repelled by poems that contain even a hint of emotion. The horror. Some try with their own work to make it machine-like, avoiding divulging feelings beyond their own amusement (which is admittedly an excellent argument for constructing anything). As if the self is a faux pas in poetry – and so in life. Some say, as if to boast, that they remove the self from their work, which is a bizarre idea, because it is they who execute the mission, either by their hand or mouth, edit, and present the outcome. Maybe I’m missing something in academic translation but an artist’s work doesn’t appear out of thin air without investment or a sense of attribution. Even if it is “found” in the anthropologic wilds – an object in situ, in a photo of graffiti or architecture, poetry made by erasure/redaction or decoupage, an image made of collage, or what-the-heck-ever. In those cases, I’ve wondered, does the artist’s gracious attention and/or appropriation, aka fiddling, bestow the Other’s voice with a new splendor while the poet’s own voice is selflessly withheld? Is there merit because the poet/Dadaist acts as a grand impresario or just mere presenter humbling themselves sufficiently as if they’re passing the mic without saying “I’m passing the mic”? Like the enshrinement of a kami for a torii, they’ll attach themselves to beauty via a gate or frame, a stand-in, as their voice, their self, despite themselves. Attempting to replace one’s embarrassing soul with one’s ghastly ego in creative work is perhaps a more accurate description of this conceit.

Duchamp used a pseudonym for the urinal when he signed R. Mutt and cutely entitled it Fountain. Get the witty flip-a-roo as the artful gesture becoming a work of art? The belier here is the fact that everyone in his circle knew it as his work on exhibit. Which brings me to Odysseus’ ego. And to, not the Anthropocene, but maybe the Aetas Ego. Joking, I’m not going to talk about Odysseus more than this allusion, which is, as an aside, an out-of-the-blue jab at Nolan’s cinematic take sans the great faux pas of sans Odysseus’ ego error shouting his own name to poor Polyphemus, thus inciting the wrath of Poseidon when he otherwise had a clean getaway. Really, I’ll stop with Homer’s critical poetic admonishment. For now. But it is our Age of Ego within which ghouls are intent on extracting souls from every person, stone, and poem. Likewise, the act of removing one’s humanity from their product – an intentional dissociative act, a sociopathy that requires effort.

Like Duchamp, some make their creative endeavor a conceptual joke, for wit, or to celebrate existential absurdity. That’s all fine and obviously I do it myself as sass is in my nature. It’s the owning up to one’s own voice, one’s human experience, that’s righteous. Not false humility or tres cool posture as a means to negate the personal so to fit in with a patriarchal pod of intellectuals, or similarly, to align with Proud Boy scum (note the collective noun) – such dunces missing entire modes of intelligence and aggressively shunning the spectrum of human emotion that exists beyond a one-toned albeit varied-decibel, sour temperament. Alas, art, like more and more aspects of our society, is trending inhuman, trans-human, post-human. Which is to say, available-for-possession; cored, hollowed, zombified, colonized, disembodied, disordered, silenced, automated, commodified, parasitized, diminished – a corpse of, an echo of, an illusion of, meaning.

Critics might call poetry that permits one’s self, or a voice that is earnest and honest, “confessional,” as if feeling something intensely enough to express it is something to be ashamed of. That compulsively writing it on the page, might embarrassingly absolve the poet of responding to their lived experience, like confessing sins to a shadow representative of the Omniscient One (irony here, obv.), with the penance, of the sin of being human, a public humiliation by a poo-pooing grinch or two. I guess it’s the guitar accompaniment that gives blues and rock music a pass for otherwise cringey lyrics delivered in whines, shrieks, and moans. Joking; we all know it’s the gender association. Confession: when the argument is against overly sentimental work I usually agree, especially if it is predictable or clichéd phrasing that is boring more than anything. But that’s not my point.

Point is, our sense of beauty has evolved with our ability to feel emotion and our ability to create beauty has developed with our ability to cultivate our soul, its embodiment. If we’re not to share our voice, our human attachment (emotional life), in creative communion, why would we create? I mean, besides for one’s insatiable and meta-emotional ego vying for attention. And if the ego has swollen larger than one’s capacity to endure and process the big feels, we should probably rather not add to the milieu of excessive raunch. Doesn’t art exist, after evolving with human experience, to connect and enhance humanity? Do creatives have a chance, if not the occasional obligation, to illustrate how to manage, preferably while imparting a sense of beauty, being fully human, how to possess our unique human vitality? If there’s no voice, no soul there, no there there (Stein’s haunted Oakland house), and certainly no beauty or truth to impart, we should maybe just STFU. It’s not like a mere poetry product is gonna provide us a livelihood. When a poet is overcome with being, and needs to share it with others with the art of feeling, poetry should be a divine, or damned, spectacle. At scale, in an appropriate font, of course.

And so, this piece, spectre. I hope the text reveals enough of its narrative. While still processing a wretched trauma, one sunny morning I kind of awoke, with the words and rhythm in my mouth, so I reached for my phone and whimpered the whole of it into the recorder app while half in a dream state. in somnis veritas, am I right?

Bundled in my earlier statement about the reason to write poetry, includes the process of personal evolution, which requires, any good therapist will tell you, confronting our emotions for resolution. And sometimes that happens in full public view. Whether we prefer to be seen in a certain light or not. As a tough kid, I very rarely cried, maybe once a year, maybe less, I don’t know. I was cool. It was agreed. Friends and strangers told me, my classmates wrote it on the backs of their school pics they gave me, my older siblings bragged about it to their friends. In public I was salty and deadpan with good reflexes and a steady hand. I had bona fide persona pride. After I had my kid, while basically still a kid myself, the floodgates slammed open. I thought, for many years, that I’d never stop crying once I started. Like in the delivery room, when my son didn’t turn after many hours of labor, and everyone and their in-laws had to check my dilation status, I was a bloody shitting spectacle on all fours. Then came the postpartum depression. I had to exit my college classrooms whenever I started sobbing. So much for being cool. And so much for school.

Like other humans, my vulnerabilities are sometimes in full view, whether or not I want it. It can be horrifying, trauma upon existing trauma. Especially when people are truly victims of abuse and need to find their way through the tangle, to find an empowerment on the other side of it. For me it’s often helpful to work such things all out while creating stuff. While I intend to be tasteful and tactful, I also want to be real, to own but also share an experience, to resonate, to connect, and to improve. If I’m lucky, the effort will also land with someone who could use it where they are or it might be appreciated by a person whose judgment I respect.

It sometimes seems a fine line between allowing one’s vulnerability to show and having the vulnerability-of-vulnerability present a target for victim-blaming, or to appear as self-pitying, pathetic, or milking attention. I knew the risk, and did it anyway, and am doing it again, sort of. This time, it’s not because I need to heal wounds while creating something, or to tell my story. Fortunately, I’ve grown a bit from past embarrassments and the rawness of terrible vulnerabilities and feel stronger from exposures. An emotional immune response, one might say. So what, we’re all victims at some point, and we have agency to transform with power. I’d much rather take that risk than let my ego sabotage the richness of living by ejecting my soul from its home. Besides, I’m past menopause, for heaven’s sake, and care less than ever about others’ perceptions. Now I stand by spectre as a creative work and feel like sharing it – presenting in print as poetry follow-through, a completion (though I might set it to film, too, at some point).

I also stand by it as Halloween-time poetry, poems I often think are kind of cool. It’s always been my favorite time of year, with various spooks and sugars. It’s a cool(ing) season when we set ablaze haunted poetry and undergo some serious molting. It’s a fun time to scream at nuisance ghouls and dispel spectres with a web-clearing hand gesture of vague or panicked disgust. It’s also a good time to sip helpful witchy brew from that favorite teacup.

 

 

Here’s the trailer

 

 

Hassen Saker is a North American experimental poet, documentary filmmaker, & interdisciplinary/transmedia creator working with texts, audio, photography, film, new media, performance, & RW actions. Her published collections of poetry include Salem (belladonna* books, 2005); Crabapples (Furniture Press, 2004); Sky Journal (Dusie Press, 2014); Consolation Snacks (Furniture Press, 2017); & spectre (above/ground press, 2026).

Her poetry films include Waiting (2007); BRUT (2011), a la Muerte de la Muerte (2012); Surge (2012); poiètes + kinesis + grapho (2013); terra lingua: three aspects (2013); Sky Journal (2014); Solastalgia, a poem by Deborah Poe (2017); Beasts: Rivers (2023); & spectre (2026).

Saker’s multimedia & art/poetry film installations have been featured online, on radio, & in art spaces/galleries. Her transmedia project, Nighttime Physicks, was published as a NFT collection on OpenSea in 2022.

She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with her partner, Lauren. More at hassensaker.com