Conyer Clayton : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Gwen Aube

Gwen Aube is the author of Missed Connections with Tall Girls (LittlePuss Press, 2026). She is a 2026 Al Purdy A-Frame Artist-In-Residence & 2025 AiR with the Ontario Heritage Council. She was a finalist for the 2025 PEN Canada New Voices Award, as well as a Kevin Killian Scholarship recipient for the Jack Kerouac School. Her chapbook pulp necrosis was published by above/ground press.

Gwen Aube reads in Ottawa alongside Claudia Coutu Radmore and D.A. Lockhart on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 as part of VERSeFest2026.

Conyer Clayton: Right from the start of the collection, with the epigraph from Richard Rohr (“God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.” p.11), we see a gesturing towards the divine through both revolutionary practices and literal religious spaces. I was struck by the following lines:

“THE SACRED AND THE LIBERATORY
BLUR BECAUSE THEY ARE BOTH MYSTERY—
BOTH STRUGGLE —BOTH LOVE—” (p.52)

and

“for this fate, i prayed at the unitarian church
& the week after at the anglican church
& the week after at the gnostic church
in the yoga studio, progressively finding myself 

in stupider & stupider places, cooking down
pomp & circumstance to its base components:
mother, child, moon, blood, sex, time,” (p.86)

Can you speak about your handling of this theme?

Gwen Aube:

So for background, I’ve had a twin set of religious experiences over the last few years. First, I started attending the aforementioned Anglican church, as well as reading theology & post-secular philosophy & such. Second, I (finally!) attended several Radical Faerie gatherings, basically mystical pagan dionysian festivals of queer holiness, which shook me to my core. Both of these spaces are primarily spiritual sites for me, but they’re also inseparably political in nature, with people advocating “works”, a radical theosis, or liberation as a spiritual cause.

The book plays with transgenderISM as virus & civilizational death-cult a lot, and for me this is really in conversation with the bits about motherhood—I don’t want this queerphobia keeping us from the human project, which one could “cook down” to that shit in the quote, mother child moon blood sex time. This, to me, is a deeply spiritual hope, situating love not just among those known to us, but among our ancestors and those who will come after us. Richard Gilman-Opalsky says that love is fundamentally outside exchange-value. Time (in this regard) acts as an illusory function of capital, and to situate storge (greekin out bitch) within deep time, beyond the functional unit, is a holy & revolutionary practice, whatever that’s worth. Like, Cuba’s Family Code is a lovely move. God willing they survive the horrific siege against them. It all just makes you want to pray, yknow?

I should say also, like many, I’ve been struck by Simone Weil. I heard about her thru Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (in hindsight, I don’t love its read of Weil, but it’s a nice book). I really, really fell in love with her. The way Weil talks about love, God, and “the good” as basically synonyms really shaped these poems. At one point I was at Webster Library daily reading her (& Diogenes Allen’s readings of her), walking around all day replaying David Cayley’s wonderful CBC radio series on her. I cried alongside the trans-canada highway at Cayley’s daughter’s reading of Weil’s quotes, which she does with such humanity.

Sorry if I’m just like name-dropping here, others are infinitely smarter than this at me & I’m still a novice reader of it, but I’m deeply grateful to be taking in the liturgy and the communal-cooking forest-orgy and writing towards the thing. I have always loved, above all, this beatific feeling.

CC: There is an incredible and effective blend of humour, desire, and violence (“if beauty is violence, let us be beautiful. / if god suffers with us, let us suffer.” p.91), and in particular, as the speaker thinks about their yearning for connection/love with/for trans women (“she shall be loved the way i have been loved—like an attack / on the stupid immutable flesh of the world. // brutally, relentlessly, without condition or mercy or pause, / she shall be loved by me.” p. 92).

How did you approach balancing love and violence around this topic?

GA: That quoted poem is about my trans-mother, Ottawa-born novelist and painter Sybil Lamb. We lived together for like 8 years, and one time, years ago now, she was goading me on cuz she was in a bad mood. She wouldn’t fuck off, so I slapped her hard in the face. Six seconds of mutual flailing later she had me in a chokehold up against the unfinished drywall. Winner, Gagnon! I won’t ever do it again, I should plead here, don’t hit people—it was parental, yknow? We’ve carried our friend with multiple-sclerosis home together, we’ve kept the cops out when runaway girls got into fist-fights over cig money, we’ve dug pits and hopped trains together. Our love has been lived in the body, and that poem reflects our context.

More broadly, the majority of the world, much of which works in slave conditions to procure our pulp & ink, is a fundamentally violent one. Primarily cuz colonial domination, but also cuz the frictionless society of the western professional-managerial arts worker is a fiction provided thru that subjugation. I grew up in a relatively violent environment & also one which was overflowing with love. Bataille has the thing about Eros and Death, which isn’t really what I’m working with (I think the love in this book is rarely eros), but there’s something of that type of fundamental tension here, too.

As for the mentioned violence of beauty, I still don’t know how to talk about this well. I think in general I’m quite intimidated by beauty as a topic. Suffice it to say the esthetician’s office is a clinical site of pure violence, going there for laser hair removal is like touching Hell, yet I too desire to get my shit peeled back for the 8-trillion-dollar Helen-of-Troy-face surgery.

CC: The importance of maintaining class consciousness is apparent within your narrative choices. The book is dedicated to homeless people, one of the sections is titled “Wearing a Fur Coat to the Welfare Office,” and various character’s positions within capitalism are continually addressed. Given the largely queer and trans speakers and characters, can you expand on the elevated importance of class consciousness to you within this book’s context?

GA: There was a study some years back in the UK (it was the British Sociological Foundation one, I think) which showed that among professional artists, those with working-class backgrounds had dropped from 16% to 8% in a decade or something. This means 92% of artists working professionally in the UK had went to Wiggly Cockswallow’s Finishing School, or whatever. When I open a litmag, it is often a bunch of elegies about getting micro-agressed by your thesis advisor. I’m empathetic of course, but as art it’s just awful. I’ve known plenty crackheads, and they have great stories to tell, and language which tastes like something. We need more crackheads in the fine arts. For that to happen, Ontario Works needs to give more than $733 per month.

Of interest to the book, queer and trans people are of course more likely to face employment discrimination and live in abject poverty. Queers are also, like the unwashed masses more broadly, cockroach-esque in our resilience, which I find beautiful. Equally interesting, however, is how trans women have that (seemingly-real??) internal petit-bourgeoisie of tech-job girlies—which is fascinating when you view us economically & culturally as a “diaspora”, and even juicier when you get into the ways in which surveillance tech fucks over poor trannies. But those are the girls mutual-aids’ing our tits fatter, too! Those girls have paid my rent, and my proximity to them is due to my transsexuality! There’s a Marxist analysis of the puppygirl polycule to be made, and I don’t think my book does it, but (like the puppygirl herself) it’s fun to poke around in.

In the closing long poem, For Herma, I cast the pregnant woman and the sea-monster in Gustav Klimt’s painting Hope 1 as lesbian lovers. They are unable to birth their unborn child because they’re literally in a painting, and thus figures of “the Imaginary”, cut-off by capital-H History, a sort of blockage of possibility within a world which irritatingly necessitates the materialist appraisal. The importance of the class analysis, which has been downgraded by an arts culture steeped in liberal institutions, is not exactly elevated within the queer context, but rather the queer subject is beautifully both within and therefore kinda the whole of the proletarian (ultimately, human!!!) subject. Yet, like the figures in the painting, one dreams of a time when the working class is not needed to be the driving force of history, when the fae may take the reigns. 

CC: I was delighted by the way you use sound play to amplify moments of hedonism. For example, in “SIN”:

“under the moon i confuse you for a fruit
your tinny iridescence & little pure 

caloric value. in the muck we suck
at the memory of colour, of the gay 

guy who snuck his fuck into the pool
next door.” (p.51)

I’d love to hear more about these craft decisions, as well as other form choices like your use of all caps (like in the quotations in earlier questions, a style used throughout the book).

GA: In the section you quoted earlier, the ALL-CAPS SCREEDS work well to delineate text into separate, cycling clauses. They also allow for a shift of voice within a poem—for example, to introduce a sense of authority, a sense of nuts-ass hollering, or an intermediate position within those. My family’s facebook posts aura farm similarly: “CARVED PUMPKINS TODAY HAHA JAMES DID YOUNG SHELDON! HAPPY HALLOWEEN LOVE YA BIG!!!” One presumes the semiotic residue of art naif within the tool’s function is self-evident, darling.

As far as sound-play in poetry, this year I’ve been falling in love with Joshua Beckman, who can make any phrase sound delightful. I also listen constantly to a big variety of rap, so rhyme & assonance is really wedged in my head. I guess it’s a game of when can I get away with it? I like to laugh in bed. Sex and drugs are funny and loopy and it’s worth honouring them thusly.

In the section Shemalaise, there’s some notations in the poems, right-aligned on the page. Those I stole from parapolitical CIA researcher & Montreal poet, Peter Dale Scott. He uses them primarily for actual citation, as many of his poems require it, but they’re lovely little intrusions,  so I adopted them for the book. His work is one of the most exciting things I’ve read recently.

This is your last question so I have to come up with other formal total geniusisms I have so I can keep talking—Dramatic dialogue has been a delightful addition to play with, I wanna do that more. I probably say internet words too much but I’m scared, were I not to, that I would be ignoring the world-as-it-is. Uhm…what else? I spent probably longer than is cool writing this, I’m really navel-gazing hard here. Thanks for caring. Reader, please let me sleep on your couch. Please google “cute baby cow”. Please find and read Lilith Latini’s poems.

Thank you for this, Conyer, your questions have been so, so thoughtful and kind.

 

 

 

Conyer Clayton [photo credit: Joanna Eldridge Morrisey] is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, Kentucky living in Ottawa. A MacDowell Fellow, Tin House Novel Summer Scholar, and author of two award-winning poetry collections and ten chapbooks, their third full-length collection of poetry, the lake-shaped excuse, is forthcoming in fall 2026 with Wolsak and Wynn.

Leanna Dias : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Sneha Subramanian Kanta

 

 

 

Born in Mumbai, Sneha Subramanian Kanta is an academician, editor, and award-winning writer residing in Mississauga. She is a 2026 InSitu Artist in Residence at Creative Hub 1352 and a 2025 Woodhaven Artist in Residence at The University of British Columbia  Okanagan. She has received a Civic Award of Recognition from the City of Mississauga and a Cultural Award from Heritage Mississauga. She is an author of six chapbooks including Every Elegy Is a Love Poem (Broken Sleep Books), Ancestral-Wing (Porkbelly Press), and Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press). Her work has been widely anthologized including in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil). She is one of the founding editors at Parentheses Journal.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta reads in Ottawa at the Common House event alongside Jennifer Baker and Vera Hadzic on Friday, March 27, 2026as part of VERSeFest 2026.

Leanna Dias: Your pieces develop such a strong relationship with nature and in said pieces your mother and your grandmother share clear environmental voices. So, do you think that without their tenderness and nurturing behaviour for the living, would you have interpreted nature in the same way that you do now?

Sneha Subramanian-Kanta: That’s such an interesting question because I think so much of it is relationality. I don’t think that would have easily been possible because, again it is that nature versus nurture debate, right? It is the privilege of being rooted in a way of belonging through family, where you are gifted a sense of who really introduced you to nature. One of my earliest memories being born and brought up in Mumbai is that of water. It is intriguing because just the other day, Mike Baynham, Professor at The University of Leeds emailed to ask about the meaning of a word in my Hindi poem. Although there is a translation of that poem in English, the word जड़ spoke to him in a different way. This is in reference to the Writing on Air Festival at Chapel FM. I spoke about being carried to playschool through this vast stretch of the Arabian Sea at Juhu Beach. My playschool was just a little ahead and we were blessed to live opposite the beach. We kind of moved through the Arabian Sea as I didn’t like going to the playschool and the sea was a place I’d always wanted to go. My maternal grandmother chose that route to distract me. We interacted with the elements. I’m certain that my relationship with nature would have at some point developed due to this memory of relation.

LD: Even from your poem “How my Grandmother Exited the Last Harbour” you make a lot of floral gestures and there was a line that said “empire will collapse like a flower burst” and I really liked that because it takes something so artificial and human made and then turns it back into nature and inwards to itself. 

SSK: I believe to look at and write about empire and flowers is not necessarily mutually exclusive. They are not two distinct things in the way metaphor or cultural erasure would have you believe them to be. What is empire really? It’s like a superstructure in which it is an apparatus of control. My maternal grandmother was a refugee from Karachi, Pakistan during the Partition. When I associate empire with a flower, for instance, I think a flower in and of itself has so many constellations and complex root systems. In that sense for me, juxtaposing the two and bringing them together in a conscious act of disobedience. It is central to my work to explore these possibilities.

This brings me to the important distinction between what mothering is considered in academic spaces. Felicia Rose Chavez in her seminal book The Anti-racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize The Creative Classroom speaks about these disparate ideas. She writes: “Why does emotional care undermine intellectual growth in my colleagues’ minds?” Through her work, I was introduced to Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. He writes “The ultimate goal of the banking system is to groom students’ passivity so as to better indoctrinate them into the dominant (white) culture.” “Translated into practice,” he reflects on how, “this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”

This generosity to imbibe living is what extends meaning, changes the shape of words to create language as ritual making for one another. She further extends it to her experiences of parenting as a mother. “Mothering” our students by listening—allowing space for them to use their voices—is an act of humility, it’s an act of conspiring toward mutual learning. When I first had my son, I thought there’s no way it’s possible, passing down this burden of how to be a person: a good boy, a just man. The responsibility felt overwhelming. It wasn’t until later, when I realized just how much I had changed since giving birth, that it dawned on me: My son is training me in how to be a person, too. Teaching is reciprocal.”

LD: That trails into your actual presence in our environment and I wanted to ask if nature is part of your identity or do you find that it is more of a means of provoking self reflection?

SSK: This is such an interesting question because my academic research and creative writing attempts to answer this question. When you bring ecopoetics into the conversation, we begin to introduce juxtaposition. For instance, this same binary you speak about— do I see a separation between nature and ourselves? The answer to that is no. These binaries are the way in which empire, colonization, even capitalism thrives. I continue to work in the research and extension of postcolonial ecocriticism.

LD: In your works you talk about the different places that you've visited and lived in—I’ve seen mentions of Paris, and I know recently as the Woodhaven Artist in Residence at The University of British Columbia  and so is home based on a locale? Or is it more an amalgamation of different elements that have resonated with you that construct what you see as home? And in that, is it that you have multiple homes or do you have one place that you are like: “no that is my home nothing else can compare.”

SSK: I was born in Mumbai and lived there for the majority of my life. It is intriguing when someone asks “Have you been home?” What does that mean? Realistically, I do not have a home in Mumbai as of today—I have no relatives I can visit or stay with in Mumbai. I haven’t visited home ever since having immigrated to Canada. During the last 3 – 4 years of my life in Mumbai before leaving for Canada, I have often been away. I was in Europe, and soon after, I was awarded a scholarship and lived in the UK for my education. I then lived in Scotland as a Writer in Residence at The University of Stirling. So home to me is an elegy, a dream, and a remembrance. I know that’s vague but home is not necessarily, at least as it currently is, a physical, tangible space, or a monolithic “hey, that’s home” and I can visit. I definitely believe that Mumbai is the closest definition of what home could mean to me, but I’m not sure if I will recognize the city. I’m actively researching the biodiversity and environmental praxis there. A project in the making touches upon home in a very scientific and archival, research-oriented way through the decades, in the politics of lyric.

LD: I like what you say about how it's not always tangible and how it is like a memory and you deal with that a lot in Every Elegy Is a Love Poem, where there is a lot about recollection, memory, your place, and your mothers passing. Lexically, your poetry explores freedom and I wanted to ask how you decided on those terminologies and how you let it not define exactly what you were going to say, but instead making it a means to say what you want to say instead of it being a limiting factor?

SSK: Your questions about images, form and structure are interesting. As a multilingual creator, I speak and dream in many languages. When I arrive on the page in English I’m looking for words which may encompass a wide spectrum of meaning. I am disobedient with how language was taught to us. There is a perception in the West of folks who have lived or been educated internationally not belonging to the English language. What this assumption does is ignore colonization and how modes of instruction, and I can speak about India, does remain English across states. It is a nation of many languages and cultures, English being one of them.

A beloved friend lives in the Netherlands, she is a poet and painter. She immigrated there when young. She is always telling me the meanings of words in Dutch. I’m one of the only people who she speaks with in English. I’m learning the way in which language twists itself on the page. I have an intimate relationship with language, with how I meld these larger extensions.

LD: Being disobedient is such a key point because when you are writing, as much as there is structure you do have to learn how to break those boundaries. The “Fragments” by Sappho relate to this quite a bit. It is a captivating element with the rest of the collection because it contains so much of what is unsaid. What was important to your message when including that work?

SSK: I read a lot of Anne Carson’s work. I love her translations of the Sappho fragments from Greek. I adore how abstraction is used.

In my work, it does not necessarily let us make sense of things entirely, but you arrive at it. Abstraction is a great way of making sense of both the poem and the world you are inhabiting. An elegy in its most basic sense is about mourning, and what if I have to put joy inside the poem, infuse it with happiness when remembering a person? What if it doesn’t have to idolize a person for adoration, could we rethink their association? What if it comes through joy, shared memories.

LD: In the poems in Every Elegy Is a Love Poem, grief is depicted as a restorative power, and even the title gives sorrow a new perspective, but I first wanted to ask you why you chose to use the unelegies too?

SSK: The un-elegy part of my work arrived much later. It took me a couple of years to realize that I’m not exactly writing an elegy though the subject matter necessitates that definition. I was working to reconstruct form, decolonizing through the written word. I challenge radical obedience and I know I repeat this word, disobedience through the interview. What is obedience, speaking in terminology? To whom are you being obedient and what are you losing in the process? What does a poem look like, appear, behave? What if I were to write against form? Poetry always calls you to reinvent. I always want to speak about un-elegy as a place of belonging as much as an elegy. Both can sit together, even share a cup of tea, but un-elegy is an invented form. It plays with disobedience.

LD: You have a previous chapbook called Ghost Tracks which breaks off from our binary assumptions of what is living and non living. To you, is this a flux with the natural world, a relationship only kindled after death? A kind of boundary crossing.

SSK: First, I’ll speak about blurring and then come to elegy. One of the things that was very important to me at the get go was blurring these lines. We spoke over email about my primary academic research being postcolonial ecocriticism where the colonial mindset of division is questioned. What is an animal? More savage? What is human? Civilized? When India experienced colonization, we were seen as savage, people who need to be taught things. For me, that blurring is deeply intentional because it dismantles false binaries which is the central dichotomy that creates an almost ontological drift. These binaries become a backbone for oppression. This is a conscious decision that comes through my academic research.

As for the elegy part of it, there are multiplicities. Some of my earliest poems engage nature in quite similar ways, but one thing that did change was that after my mother not being physically present in this world, I had a lot of solitude—time with nature. I suddenly would look at things in Mumbai more closely. A lot of people argue that Mumbai doesn’t have seasons but I wouldn’t agree. I began thinking about rivers. The Mithi River looked different from when I was growing up. The river has become a nullah now. What does it mean when capital drives decision-making and people in the city are tethered to the idea of economic prosperity underlying the notion of separated environments? Nature is a mode, not a means to an end.

 

 

 

 

 

Leanna Dias was born and lives in Ottawa where she is currently a student at the University of Ottawa for English and Linguistics. She has been part of Common House, the university’s in-house literary magazine since 2024, working now as a Junior Editor.

Amanda Earl : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Isabella Wang

 

 

 

Isabella Wang [photo credit: Lj Weisberg] is the author of November, November (Nightwood 2025), Pebble Swing (Nightwood, 2021), a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc's Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and Long Poem Contest, Minola Review’s Inaugural Poetry Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Wang’s poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and five anthologies, including Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020), They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2021), The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese-Canadian Writers Fiction (Wolask & Wynn 2022). She is finishing her MA in Sociology, and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, Revise-Revision Street.

Isabella Wang reads in Ottawa alongside T. Liem and Lucia Farinon at the Arc Poetry Magazine event on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

Amanda Earl

November, November weaves grief over the death of Phyllis Webb, the importance of celebrating poets while they're alive and your own health issues. You mention in the Afterword that during the summers of your undergraduate program at Simon Fraser University, you listened to Phyllis Webb reading her poetry. Your book includes lines from her poems. Was this the first time you encountered her work or were you already a fan? What it is about her poetry that resonated for you?

Isabella Wang

That was my first summer while attending university. I got a research assistant job with SpokenWeb, which took me to the archives of Special Collections at the SFU library. My job was listening to, and collecting pieces of data contained on cassette tapes from reading events that happened between 1940-80s I believe. Phyllis’s voice is there, with Fred Wah, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and honestly, many of CanLit’s favourite poets. I was already aware of Phyllis Webb when I came across the tapes, but I paid her tapes special attention because she was a poet who had fascinated me a lot already by then. In various classes I took, Phyllis’s work was taught, and so I spent a lot of time engaging academically and creatively with her poetry. And also her photographs and art! I think on one level, her poems challenged me. It took a lot of creative attempts to understand what she was doing with her ghazals, breaking the form, for instance, and for me to recognize the significance of that as a first year English student and also a poet myself. As someone who danced ballet professionally for most of my early teens before I grew immersed in the writing community, I was also inspired by Phyllis’s own creative segues. For the last 3 decades of her life, she stopped writing poetry. A lot of people struggled to understand that I think. But to me, just because she stopped writing doesn’t mean her creativity ceased. She migrated to paintings, to photography. I have some of her pieces in my home. In that sense, she was a lot like me. I resonated with not only her poetry, but what she did after she stopped writing.

Amanda Earl

You use a lot of fascinating specialized vocabulary from medicine, science and other domains in the book. I’ve learned a lot of beautiful words. For instance on the opening page of Constellations, November 2020, you write

constellations
are ageless suns reborn as stars
in the seats
of a conversation               they can
neither ferry            nor pine
for a different steradian
arrangement 

“Steradian” or square radian is a term used in three-dimensional geometry. The precision of this term is striking. Or in “Untitled for Otoniya J. Okot Bitek” you write of “polyvagal” rivers and “after everything else fell asleep/from the palpebrae of a monochrome world.”

I love the word “palebrae” which means the upper eyelid. I had to look up such words and I enjoyed that, enjoyed learning and also seeing how you applied these abstracts in a very concrete way, to strengthen the image. How do you have access to such language? Is it something you’ve studied or do you consult various dictionaries and reference books to come up with terms that articulate your desired image?

Isabella Wang

I think it’s a lot of both. English is technically my second language even though it’s my predominant language, so sometimes the way I approach words and phonetics is different. I also played piano when I was younger, and that along with the music during dance and ballet, I think helped me grow attuned not just to the meaning of words, but their sounds as well. The textured resonances of certain words often stay with me, words I often don’t even know the meanings of but conjure, perhaps, because I’ve come across them in brief encounters and made a mental record. Sometimes when I write poems, a word will come to me not because it works meaning wise but because it’s sounds right musically. And sometimes it so happens that the meaning is right too. Other times I think of a word musically, but it happens that I was in fact looking for another word that sounds similar but has a different meaning. Other times, I know what I want to say, but I don’t like how words sound. So out comes the dictionary. I use the dictionary a lot in all forms of my writing.

Amanda Earl

After my near-death health crisis beginning in November, 2009, I tried to write poetry about it as early as January 2010 and I couldn’t. I found it difficult to balance my need to make art with my need to be scrupulously accurate. I ended up writing an unvarnished and unedited account of my recovery and health crisis in the form of a blog. Can you talk about the process of writing about your cancer diagnosis and treatment and if you encountered any stumbling blocks or hesitations in writing about it? What it did it feel like to write about it and also to read from the book?

Isabella Wang

I wrote extensively about writing through health and grief in this article with All Lit Up.

As for reading it, I really enjoyed reading from this book just because it was new work, and I felt like this collection, the mood and vibe, is a better reflection of who I am than my earlier collection.

 Amanda Earl

I love that you use a lot of different styles in the book. I was especially keen on the sonnets. There’s lots of play here. What would you like to say about playing with form and specifically about your experiences writing sonnets and why this was something you wanted to include in the book.

Isabella Wang

I’ve always been an admirer of form, and the way that different poets use or invent form. I especially love experimental forms. For me, the form of a poem is like a home for people. It’s hard for people to exist without stable sanctuary or a home that is equipped with their different needs based on their individual selves and bodies, and for me, the words I want to express operate quite similarly. A lot of the time, I don’t know what I want to do with the opening words of a poem, or what the poem is even about, until I am playing with a form that works. Many of the poems in this book take on experimental forms because I am simultaneously experimenting with how to live after severe illness and disability, through a lot of trial and error. I lose my stamina, energy, cognitive abilities as I was recovering from surgery. The brain fog was bad and I had a lot of incomplete poems. The sonnets actually began as long form poems. I wanted to mirror George Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. He sits at a cafe and is just listing all the things he sees and hears, ordinary things, wondering if he can truly “exhaust” a place by listing everything about it. I decide I would do the same for a period of time. Everyday list the things I see in my environment, except stuck at home, the place I am writing about is my room. Perhaps more mundane than the city of Paris, but this the place I’m stuck in, so I was wondering if I could transfer the monotony of my life in my sick body to my readers through that long form. Unfortunately, getting up everyday to list things was too intense when I had so little energy. It wasn’t a sustainable project, so I had to figure out a way to work with the one or two days that I was able to get up and list things. Which required a different form, something smaller, more contained. The sonnet worked given the constraints of the lines, and even though the sonnet was a form that greatly challenged me before, it worked when I tried it this time. Serendipity!

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) [photo credit: Charles Earl] is a working writer, editor, publisher, reviewer, visual poet, who writes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is grateful for funding received from the City of Ottawa to work on her manuscript of winter sequences. Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry.  Please visit AmandaEarl.com for more information or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for musings on finding joy in difficult times.

rob mclennan : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Nada Gordon

 

 

Nada Gordon: Backwards Bio: I live in Brooklyn and work too hard and too much, teaching courses like “Tyranny and the Absurd” and “The Glamour of Language.” Actually, they are just comp, but isn’t that what all art is, actually? I have two Siberian cats. I make things besides poems: garments, baubles, toys. My Etsy shop is https://www.etsy.com/shop/ScentedRushes. I’ve published nine books and lots of chapbooks besides. My selected, The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015 found its way into the world last year by way of SubPress. “The Sound Princess” is a literal translation from the Japanese of “Otohime,” the button you push in a toilet stall to make the sound of rushing water so that others don’t hear you pee. It does sound grand, doesn’t it? I was in the hysterico-transgressive poetry movement called Flarf in the 2000s. Before that, I lived in Japan for over a decade. Before Japan, I wrote a thesis on Bernadette Mayer’s work. I studied with Language Poets in Bay Area in the 80s. I was a hardcore punk after I was a flower child. As an actual child I sometimes wrote poems. I was born in Oakland in 1964.

Nada Gordon lectures in Ottawa at The Factory Lecture Series and reads via “VERSeFest presents” on Sunday, March 29, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

rob mclennan: There’s a lot of information swirling around this “backwards bio” of yours, from studying with the Language Poets in the Bay Area in the 80s to writing a thesis on Bernadette Mayer’s work to your work as one of the Flarf poets in the 2000s. Can you speak a bit of some of that trajectory? Which Language Poets, and what do you think you learned from them? Or Mayer’s work, also? How did you get from any of there to here?

nada gordon: Ah, you are asking me to speak about causality, which is something we love to find (though we can’t always prove it) retrospectively.  I think we need to go back further into the murky past, before these literary coming-of-age experiences, to consider my bildung, a word that reminds me of binturong, a curious animal about which I am curious but have not yet encountered. My bildung may be of interest (to someone, perhaps) mostly insofar as it is a record of countercultural forces: my parents were beatnik-adjacent, and were introduced, I hear, by a bongo player in Berkeley, where my mom studied literature and my father also wrote poetry.  

To put a finer point on it, I emerged into an already “alternative” environment that morphed as the culture morphed from beatnik>hippies>punk>avant-garde (langpo, NY School, Flarf).  It seemed to me like a quite natural continuum, always wanting to be on some level “disruptive,” but not in the sense that the corporate “creatives” use the word.  I didn’t plan out this trajectory so much as follow its drift. Despite my tendency towards transgression, I love a lot of canonical poetry. As a tween, I had a green hardbound anthology: The Major Poets: English and American, edited by Charles M. Coffin.  I read it very attentively, since poetry seemed to be something of value that one ought to pay close attention to, and much of what was in it seemed to me to be incredibly weird and mysterious, like these lines from John Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”: The dead shall live, the living die/ and music shall untune the sky.  I still have the book, and it still carries for me a feeling of fustiness mixed with fascination.

How I drifted into the heady atmosphere of Language Poetry specifically requires another story.  I have to start with seventh grade. I was going to a really normal junior high school where the teachers had a knack for making interesting things like grammar incredibly boring.  “The boy threw the ball to me” was the example sentence for teaching us about direct and indirect object. I did not see the point of this banal sentence or this way of teaching, and I felt stifled, alienated, and bullied by the other children.  I now see this bullying as fundamentally antisemitic, since they were making fun of my curly hair calling me Brillo Pad–and following me after school: “why do you have such a big butt?”... essentially mocking my Old World body type. Those bitches, with their Charlie’s Angels hair and platform shoes! Thankfully my mom and temporary stepfather took me out of that school and put me in an alternative school, where we had a kind of morning encounter group, did improv, sang in a white-kids-singing-Black-gospel choir, and went hiking together.  The school fell apart after a year, sadly, but one teacher, the one who led the choir, volunteered to teach those who wanted to pass the GED.  We studied in his living room and backyard.  He taught us basic algebra, the roots of the blues, and simple research skills, and somehow, with his signature saying that I had completed eleventh grade work, I passed the exam at age thirteen.  

I started college soon after, and I’d go for a semester and then drop out, especially after I was given a Ramones record on my fourteenth birthday and rather suddenly went from flower child to punk rocker.  I would spend days Situationistically wandering the streets of SF with my friends, hanging out with all sorts of decadent and bizarre people: junkies, strippers, musicians, fans.  The editors of Search and Destroy gave me books, like surrealist poetry, Les Chants de Maldoror and  À rebours. I feel I got as good an education during these extracurricular semesters as I did in school, wandering in City Lights.  

Although I did have a sort of Plath-imitative period as a young teen (who doesn’t?), I always felt there was something…unsavory…even…icky…about confessional I-centric poetry.  Identity poetry also seemed to me to be very corny and limiting. I needed an alternative that was more in line with my countercultural, disruptive experiences and imagination.  So when, after my spotty attendance at community colleges, I started at San Francisco State University when I was 18, I was fortunate to have Stephen Rodefer as my first creative writing teacher there.  

He was very very handsome, like an old movie star, and as a teacher he was somewhat reserved, which lent him extra mystique.  And, as one really ought to in a CW class, we spent much more time reading interesting things and talking about the readings, instead of [shudder] “workshopping.”  I remember one activity in particular that turned my world around:  he brought in a page of idioms he had photocopied from a dictionary, and had us make a poem from them.  Ah, I thought:  poetry is construction/reconstruction.  

It was the heyday of language writing. The Bay Area writing community was very much involved with SFSU.  In Kathleen Fraser’s Writers on Writing course, which consisted entirely of guest speakers, I was exposed to, among many others, Bruce Boone and Bob Gluck, Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, and Carla Harryman, with whom I later worked (as well as Larry Price) at The Poetry Center there.  There was a thriving reading series. In my second year at SFSU, as a senior, I took Barrett Watten’s class on Russian formalism, and this was perhaps the most useful to me in helping me to articulate my own developing poetics, and to think about what “poetry” means in the most expansive way possible (that is to say, it is not necessarily to be found within the confines of “verse”).

Whew. You asked also about Bernadette Mayer.  I learned about her when I undertook the reorganization and reshelving of all of the books at the SFSU poetry center.  This was also how I discovered Clark Coolidge.  These discoveries were electrifying.  When I started at Berkeley in the MA program in 1985, I felt that she would be a good subject for my thesis.  I didn’t want to write about anyone I knew, because I felt that would be awkward.  Her work was expansive, mutable, unusual, and various, so I thought through it chronologically and considered how it developed.  The chapters are all online on my mostly defunct blog, except for the chapter on Midwinter Day, which I will happily send a pdf of for anyone who is interested.

I mostly felt, in this group of writers, that I had “found my people,” except that they were all 10-15 years older than me, and most of them were from Ivy League backgrounds that couldn’t have been more different from my peripatetic hippie/punk childhood.  Also, there was a palpable male dominance one felt especially in the Q and A sessions after talks that was perhaps not the very best model of group dynamics for a young woman writer.  On top of that, the “poetry wars” started to feel very oppressive, so when I was 24, I up and moved to Japan, where I stayed for eleven years.

rm: That does seem quite the response. How did your work respond to leaving that particular landscape, and landing more than a decade in Japan? Were you publishing much by this point?

ng: Nope.  Just a couple of little chapbooks.  I wrote  in notebooks constantly when I was there, though, taught a couple of poetry writing courses, edited a one-issue journal, and participated in the mainly English-language poetry reading scene. That scene was actually great fun, since readings tended to be more like festivals, with musicians, dancers, and performance artists. 

Ways my work was transformed by being there for so long:

Asymmetry
Odd numbers (threes/fives)
Desire for things not to sound settled or finished
Piercing responses to and endless craving for total atmospheric multisensory beauty
Mixed feelings
Just right/just wrong juxtapositions
A wild avant-garde (butoh, Terayama Shuji)
Dislike  of clarity and brashness
Nature
Language struggle
Misunderstanding, mishearing, misapprehension
Return of the repressed in the form of melodramatic extremity
Funny-haha and funny-peculiar
Delicious and smells good
Ancient + modern
Animism
A world of dew… 

Etc.

While it was destabilizing to be there, it was also, after the first year and a half of culture shock, calming, and I was grateful to be cushioned against the sturm und drang of the USA, a place I remain decidedly less fond of.

rm: How did you find engaging with the poetry community upon your return to the United States?

ng: It may be hard for others to imagine just how disorienting it was to move from a long time in Tokyo to NYC.  I had been to NYC a couple of times in my teens, and had fun in what was then its wildness (now it’s just exhausting, not so wild), but I had no idea what to expect about living here.  Was it safe? Could I walk around?  Was someone going to squirt pretzel mustard on me as a prelude to a robbery?   Would I lose my refinement?  Would I get rough around the edges?

I didn’t know the new idioms.  Someone would say “don’t go there,” in a kind of intonation I’d never heard, meaning, don’t inquire further.  I felt like Rip van Winkle.  It was 1999, just the beginning of the popular internet, and I’d been in this incredible delicate straw and paper world for so long.  I really missed the smells:  dashi at dinnertime, or the smell of tea roasting at a tea shop.  NY was mostly odiferous, except for those roasted cashews sold from carts on the street; they smelt better than they tasted.

As far as “the poetry community” goes, there wasn’t really one.  There were many:  micro-affiliations, chosen lineages, closed clubs, generations, tendencies.  It was fascinating to meet people I’d been paying attention to since my teens: Alan Davies, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Abigail Child (whom I had met briefly in the Bay Area years before), and Bernadette Mayer, most of whose oeuvre, of course, I knew from the inside out.  That all felt very cool.  But it also felt like a renaissance court, and I had to figure out the hierarchies, the norms, and the topics of current conversation. 

A friend tells me I seemed insufferable, because I came into this city acting like I knew everything and was self-assured of my talents.   I hadn’t “paid my dues” or “put in the work” required to become visible and connected in the poetry world.  But, you know, I’d been developing and evolving…just…elsewhere. 

rm: Vladislav Davidzon recently referred to you as “Queen of luscious maximalism.” How do you see yourself and your work in terms of that particular title?

ng: As much as I enjoy learning about the dramatic histories of monarchies, I am anti-monarchical except regarding butterflies. It’s true that the title of my Selected Poems is The Sound Princess, but that is a literal translation of the Japanese word otohime, which means the little button one pushes in a toilet stall that makes the sound of flushing so that no one can hear you tinkle.  It’s true that my writing often tends to be luscious and maximalist, but that’s a sort of simplistic characterization (sorry, Vlad dear).  I can also do acerbic, if not quite shibui, and I’m not a total stranger to poetic compression/condensation, either.  I don’t think all dichten=condensare, for sure. I suppose I’m a bit contrarian.  If literary fashion leans one way, I will lean the other to balance things out.  But when I do do high femme I do it with all my ornamental might; on that you can rely.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.