Manahil Bandukwala : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Hajer Mirwali

Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025), is a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Hajer’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland. 

Hajer Mirwali reads in Ottawa alongside Paul Vermeersch and Jérôme Melançon onFriday, March 27, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

Revolutions is described as being about shame and pleasure, and how they intersect. In particular, I resonated with the instances of hiding and deflecting, and how that’s held in fraught tension with the relationships we hold dear. How does putting the book out to a public audience respond, in a meta-textual way, to this hiding?

I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought enough about what would happen once the work became public. When I was writing it, I was so focused on remaining “true” to my experience at the time, I hadn’t really thought about future Hajer reading the poems in front of an audience. Of course, I had considered certain levels of censorship and protection. It’s why I introduced the character “xxxxxxx”. When writing the book, I had recorded conversations with young women in my community about shame and pleasure. Their identities are all concealed, they all appear as xxxxxxx to both keep them anonymous and to portray the collectivity of their stories. Beyond that, I didn’t really consider concealing myself. I think the book very obviously reads as auto-biographical (I even use my own name at one point). It definitely has been exposing and vulnerable having the book out in public and doing events. The most difficult part is perhaps the reception by my mom. But I think it helped us have good conversations and a better understanding of each other. Overall, I think she is supportive of me as a writer. She was interviewed for the book as well, so she is deeply embedded in it.

I do love though that the publication of the book does what I could not do while writing it, which is to explode the system of shame of suppression, to get out of the circle. I’m writing about being trapped, and in writing, I escape the trap. I did an event last summer for the Cross-Pollination series by the League of Canadian Poets (in which they pair a poet with a health care worker) with my cousin, the psychotherapist Zainib Abdullah and she talked about how the antidote to shame is courage. I think it was courageous of me to write and publish this book, to expose myself in this way. It helped me heal and work through a lot of the shame I felt growing up. It’s especially fulfilling when I do a reading and a woman comes up to me after and says, I had the same experiences. I can’t believe you’re writing so openly about sex and masturbating. How are you doing it? I think I just had to do it. I had to get these things out and share them. None of us should carry all our shame alone. The more we share with each other, the lighter the load we each have to carry.

That being said, I am definitely thinking about how to better protect myself with my next book, which will be a thematic sequel to Revolutions and a deeper exploration of shame that gets more into childhood trauma. How do I create a bit more distance between myself as the subject and as the poet? I am now considering future Hajer who will read those poems in front of an audience and may have to reveal certain things that happened to her. I’m considering ways in which I can write about my life without writing in first-person. I want to remove the “I” completely.

I’m curious about your extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s work, especially given a photograph of the piece appears in the book! Had you expected that outcome when putting the manuscript together?

When I first wrote Revolutions in 2019 for my MFA thesis, I got in contact with Mona Hatoum’s studio and told them what I was working on. Later, when I was working with my publisher, Talonbooks, we contacted her studio again to get permission to use a photo of + and –. They gave us permission for the photo and said Hatoum was interested in receiving a copy of the book when it came out, but I was never in contact with her directly. Maybe one day – you never know!

One interesting thing that happened is in the original manuscript, I had multiple photos of the sculpture at different points in its revolution that didn’t make it into the final book. I had taken the photos myself when I saw the piece in Barcelona. They weren’t good quality and we couldn’t get Hatoum’s team to redo them, so my copy editor, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and I thought of other ways to represent the sculpture. We ended up with the “clock” concrete poems (“her hand at one / her hand at seven”, etc.). They represent the two arms of + and – moving around the sand, and they also capture the themes of time and waiting that run throughout the book. It was a bit of a frustrating editorial issue that ended up leading to creative problem solving that I think is stronger and adds another layer of meaning that the original photos may not have been able to convey.

The “clock” concrete poems were one of many things I loved about the book. They featured as a constant grounding in the poetry and the words. I began to look forward to seeing how you were going to play with the word and page space. It’s fascinating hearing that this form evolved after the fact. Were there other aspects of the book that took form in the editorial process?

At the line level, the final book is relatively similar to the original manuscript I sent to Talon. I did however add two additional poems. The first was Ramadan Record which I had written in 2019 and removed from the manuscript because it didn’t seem to fit in cohesively with the rest of the book. Then I started to miss it and through it might work well in terms of amplifying the theme of time and providing another type of form in the middle of the book. I see it now as a kind of hinge point.

The second poem was Sift which is a new poem I wrote while working with my substantive editor, Rahat Kurd. She and I talked about whether I was doing the mother figure enough justice and thought it would make sense to have more of her perspective, to soften and lend more empathy to her. With Sift being the last poem in Revolutions, and written from the mother’s point of view, I see it as an addendum or commentary on the rest of the book.

I actually had to pull back a lot while editing to prevent myself from changing the integrity of the book. I was editing it five years after I had written it, so I had changed quite a bit as a person and as a poet. At the risk of publishing certain poems that I may now find underdeveloped or cringey, I’m glad I honoured Revolutions for what it is – a time capsule of what I was dealing with at that time.

Could you talk about incorporating the Arabic texting code into your poems?

The first poem I wrote for the book, before I really knew it was going to be this book, was 3aib, which means shame in Arabic. I had to use the word 3aib without translating it because 3aib holds so much weight and context. It means shame, but it doesn’t feel the same. Then I realized there is no other way to write 3aib so I have to introduce the texting code.

I should clarify here that I did not invent this code – it’s how Arabic-speaking people write to each other when transliterating to English. The numbers represent letters in Arabic with sounds that don’t exist in English. Some words, like habibi (my love) can be written as habibi or 7abibi. The 7 is the Arabic letter ح which is a hard h (kind of like the sound you’d make when warming up your hands). H works well enough but 7 is more accurate. But with the word 3aib, the 3 is the Arabic letter ع which is a guttural throaty sound, and there’s nothing like it in English. Writing just aib or eib would make no sense.

So for the 3aib poem, I figured that if I had to use the texting code for that word, why not use it for every transliterated word? I loved how the numbers looked on the page, so weird and computational. It was accurate to the language and also created a little secret between me and other Arabic-speaking people who would read the book (though this wasn’t my main motivator). I actually overuse the code to the point that it may even become complicated for Arabic-speaking people to translate. But I think a secret code is a perfect literary device for a book about secret lives and identities and hiding and censorship. Also, numbers are just really cool.

I loved your choice to include the code for all transliterated words! The numbers in the code worked so well visually with the clock concrete poems. You’ve mentioned your next book will be a thematic sequel to Revolutions. Do you envision the book having the same level of visual and linguistic experimentation, with the concreteness and the code?

Before writing Revolutions, I was strictly a lyric poet and it was in working with Margaret Christakos during my MFA that she introduced me to experimental feminist poetry and I began playing in that tradition. I love both styles of poetry so much and I think the next book while be somewhere in the middle. I know I want to challenge my diction a lot (it’s a weak spot for me) and I definitely imagine there will still be some visual experimentation. I’m writing and thinking a lot now about deeply rooted shame and trauma and repressed memories, so I am always asking myself what it means to write through the body. I don’t think lyric poetry alone is enough to answer that question.

I’m not sure what the shape will be exactly, but I do want to carry forward some of the procedures I began with Revolutions, particularly the research work of interviewing people. I love the idea of writing that’s created in community, sharing language with the people around me. It helps me expand my view and my vocabulary, and it also helps me feel less isolated while writing. I trust that as I work on the next book, the poems will help tell me what form they need to be in, and any experimental elements will come out organically.

 

 

 

 

 

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

rob mclennan : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Lydia Unsworth

 

Lydia Unsworth is a poet from Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4 above/ground press chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).

Lydia Unsworth 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: You’ve two new titles out this spring—Stay Awhile and This Now Extends to My Daughter—how do you see these titles in terms of your overall trajectory?

Lydia Unsworth: Firstly, these two books were written in parallel, in one great sprawling document, so I’m really pleased they are coming out at the same time. I kind of see them as siblings. They are the first books I received any kind of funding to help me write, which was fantastic as I was out of work for a little while and this great sprawling document written late at night was how I was processing everything and making a game of it. Anyway, due to the funding, I was able to pay for editing and worked with Fran Lock on them. I wrote into the poems for a long time and essentially cleaved the document in two. I think I was angrier writing these two books than I have been during the writing of any of my previous books, which I suppose is part of growing up and understanding the larger systems behind everything and the traps they keep us in. But I was also funnier, and less scared of hiding the ignorance and honesty in my voice, and that shift came through repeated performing. I started performing more regularly after 2022, so after I’d finished writing Arthropod (Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers), which was written during the pandemic largely and in the Netherlands. There’s a poem in my above/ground pamphlet, Gag, called “Montage”, and I read that at Tom Branfoot’s More Song poetry night in Bradford, UK, and people were laughing, and that experience kind of changed the way I wrote. I found I only wanted to read the funny ones, and so I had to write more of them. I also realised that I could write exactly what happened in a way, and the poetry was in the filter of the noticing, all the stored-up connections, and in the placements of the little punchlines among the seriousness. So basically, to answer the question, I think these two books are just my voice, without anymore the trying to find or hide it, and they are written with performance in mind.

rm: Is an attention to performance how you usually approach composition? How does the text on the page translate to performance, and is that something you hope the reader might garner from their own reading?

LU: I think attention to how it sounds out loud is how I approach composition, or rhythm, or where I put it on the page. And I suppose humour underlies everything I do. Like, if it amuses me, then it must work on some level. I don’t know if that’s the same as performance, but it’s definitely vocal now, my rhythm, and I don’t know how that comes across on the page, or in another person’s inner voice, but I try to make the spacing tell the reader where to pause. And I write a lot of prose poetry, as you know, which is supposed to be intense and frantic and fast to me. I remember seeing “Not I” by Samuel Beckett at the theatre in Salford once, and I think those 7 minutes of a disembodied red-lipsticked mouth screaming at me in a crowd in the dark was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me. A friend did say at my last reading that she thinks my poems are made for the performing of them, and that was interesting, that this feeling I had about the change could indeed be sensed by another. But saying all this, there isn’t any really performative element to the way I read, it’s the dead-pan under performance of it, the sort of resilient cheeky resignation of the voice somehow, I dunno. It’s like I hold the emotions inside a certain dry irreverence to stop it all getting out of hand.

rm: I’m curious where this approach to the prose poem as “intense and frantic and fast” emerged.

LU: I think that’s just how my brain thinks. I started writing in a very automatic way, during my art degree, just typing as fast as I could, and I love the surprise of it, the way the brain associates, almost bypassing consciousness, or at least reflection, and sometimes the connections feel a little bit like magic, like everything is just hanging around in there waiting to be used, both very new stuff, the ephemera of the day, for example, or phrases from a film or song, mixed up with really old, imprinted stuff from way back. And then the editing carves into that, shapes it. I like maintaining the rectangle of thought, and the speed of the capture. I suppose in that way it reminds me of photography, in that it’s near instant and sort of the same shape, as opposed to a carefully planned-out painting composition.

I’m not saying all prose poetry works like this, but the writing I like tends to make me want to read faster and faster and sort of fill myself with the all-over-the-consciousness energy of it. Like a thought roller coaster.

rm: Honestly, I think this fits in with your approach to the placement of your poems on the page as notational, as you suggest; how lines appear on the page. Do you see your poems, then, as equally comfortable on the page as they are being performed?

LU: Yes, I see them as the same these days. Of course I don’t know how it is to be somebody else, but the way I perform them is exactly how they are to me as I write them. There’s a little more adrenaline in the performance, and a little more confidence on the page, perhaps, but it’s a minor detail.

rm: I’m intrigued at the idea of these two works composed in parallel, paired in a single expanded compositional document. Is this a structure you’ve worked prior to these collections? What prompted them into two separate titles as opposed to something singular, made up of parts?

LU: I think it was the editing process with Fran that helped me separate them. As I said, I was out of work for a time, and I was taking a train every week to a sort of overlooked middle-sized town nearby Manchester to complete a job application in a café and go look for the most exciting concrete building I’d seen in that place on the internet, to kind of try to gamify the mundanity of the process. I didn’t like the way I was free (from work) but also trapped (by parenting and by the job centre’s ludicrous demands that you’re supposed to apply for 30 jobs a week and spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing so, as if that’s any indication of quality) by circumstance, so I was trying to find a way to bend the situation into something that felt more creative, and justify going for a walk basically. So the document started there, documenting all these places and buildings and my moving through them (I was recently back to the UK after 7 years away and was terribly homesick) as a distraction from the larger structure stuff I had going on in my life at the time. Anyway, the structural stuff was of course creeping into the poems – the job centre, the admin, the insomnia, relationships, things the kids needed (like housing!) – but I just kept going, writing it all down, usually very late at night. Then at some point I had nearly 300 pages of it. Usually way before that point I sort of stop and assess what’s happening in the document and break it up and chuck bits out (so yes, I do often start with just one document), but I didn’t have any headspace for that. And that’s right around the time the arts funding came in and I found something part-time to tide me over until I figured out what to do next and a lot of the pressure released. Then I realised there were two very different collections here, and also that one of the reasons I hadn’t stopped was that I had a lot more to say about the kind of post-industrial, underfunded environments I had moved back to, but that’s another story.

rm: Do you see your work as responses to environment? How do your poems begin?

LU: Yes, definitely. I also spend a lot of time at the moment travelling to specific environments precisely in order to respond to them. A lot of my work currently is working in this way. I like the rich yet almost boring details of the (predominantly urban) environment, and how by attending to such details you raise their status, change their nature. I love the accidental juxtapositions in the landscape, in shop windows, in car parks, or just passing by. The same street can provoke a different poem every time I pass it, and I actually have a lot of recent prose poetry sort of hyper-focused on the details of the school run. I love walking with other people too, as fragments of the conversations we have flow together through the landscape’s own poetry and my personal memories and associations when I later come to write it up. And that blend, also mixed with focused reading – like knowing what I want to fill my consciousness up with and why before I start writing – does a lot of the work for me it seems.

Saying that, my early drafts too often begin with “I was walking ..” or “On the bus yesterday ...” and I do often have to chop the first bit away in the editing process. 

rm: I’m curious about the way you shape manuscripts, as you sound very much as someone who writes books, as opposed to individual, stand-alone poems. Have you a shape or a subject matter or a sense of form or tone in mind when attempting to begin a project, or is the process more organic?

LU: I do write books at the moment, I think, and I noticed that myself only recently. Perhaps that’s the freedom of having the time while I’m doing a PhD. I think I was writing out of a sense of desperation or “needing to catch up” for a long time there, as I didn’t really have the confidence to know how to even begin for about a decade, despite sort of being sure this was the only thing I really wanted. My first baby was born just before my first book was published and I remember writing that very intensely while pregnant, with what was in a way the deadline expanding inside me. Happily, I think the kids just meant I didn’t have enough time to worry about failing anymore; I could write first, and have anxiety later, that was the thinking. Anyway, that’s besides the point. I think now, since the experience of splicing this document in two, I think maybe, at least currently, I am working in a much more project-based way. Though, saying that, there is also a sprawling document running alongside those projects, which is accumulating mass in a more organic fashion. It’s actually already very long – but, to quote NOFX, the desperation’s gone. Or, it’s changed, in any case.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is the author of nearly fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), listed recently by the CBC in their “Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2025.” A further title, edgeless, a suite of long poems, will be out this spring with Catlin Press. His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in July. He is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival, which holds its 16th annual festival from March 24-29, 2026.