rob mclennan : 2026 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Jeremy Audet

Jeremy Audet
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

Jeremy Audet is the Non-Fiction Editor at yolk and Founding Editor of Canto. His writing has been awarded the Bridge Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the CBC Short Story Prize, and others. He is a 2026 Writer-in-Residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-Frame Association and lives in Montreal. 

The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.

What first brought you to poetry?

I’d written French poetry in high school, but mostly abandoned reading and writing for some years. One day in class my impressionable young-adult brain, having barely settled from the young-adult antics of the night before, encountered John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I teared up. He’d somehow put into perfect words the same questions, heartaches, and convictions I was experiencing two centuries after him. I guess it was an epiphany. I registered for an English degree and started reading again.

I wrote sometimes, mostly romantic little odes or ekphrastic poems while travelling, but I first started writing poetry as a serious pursuit midway through my degree. I devoted two weeks one winter break entirely to typewriting a thirty-page poem, which was really a mosaic of ideas and language from all the writers I wanted to emulate. Woolf, Auden, Barbauld, Keats, Ginsburg, Eliot, Whitman. It was a terrible poem, but once I’d written it I felt that, okay, I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, now I can write my own poems. In the years since, I’ve been blessed with incredible mentors both academic and creative, all of whom have kept that initial epiphany going.

How did you get from that point to starting to send out work? What did that process look like? Once you moved beyond those original poets, who were your more contemporary models or mentors?

As part of my Honour’s thesis I studied twentieth-century literary magazines in Canada. I also co-edited the literary journal at my university, Bishop’s, for an issue. Some friends were also starting their own journal – yolk, for whom I now work – and so the process of submitting work for publication seemed relatively accessible. I was very methodical about it: I created a spreadsheet with my poems on the y axis and journals on the x axis, and started submitting. I can still go back and see which publications rejected a poem before its eventual publication. It’s also a good way to keep track of which poems I should keep working on. Most poems of mine have gone through four, five, six significant rewrites before their eventual publication.

I remained pretty loyal to the romantics and modernists until I encountered Derek Walcott. Omeros is a masterpiece that shattered my conception of what poetry made possible. I read it every year. Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin write in Walcott’s general legacy, and I admire their works to a great measure. Etel Adnan and Linnea Axelsson, too, are writers in translation I’ve modeled some work from. I focussed on ecopoetics during my Master’s, Nicholas Bradley being one of those aforementioned mentors and also a poet I admire, so I also have to highlight the impact of Rita Wong, Don McKay, and Derek Mahon on my own writing. Recently, though, and perhaps in keeping with my Walcottian orbit, I’m reading Seamus Heaney.

You say you originally began writing in French. Is there a difference in the way you might approach writing in French, as opposed to English? Is French a language you still explore through your work?

I've only recently returned to reading and writing in French. Despite it being my mother tongue, I spent most of my youth in English schools abroad, and with the exception of high school continued in English when I moved to Canada. The little French writing I have done is more colloquial, phonetic, usually short portraitures or lyrics. I approach it more carefully, thinking slowly as I go.

But French has been entering my English work in substantial ways as of late. Two of the poems that consist of “EARTH GIGANTIC” directly engage with the French language, asking questions about interlingual exchange, impossible translations, and what it means to have a tongue in both mouths. The major project I'm working on this year – a novel – has French-English dynamics as a central motif.

There’s a French word, dépaysement, I can’t stop thinking about. A literal translation would be “the feeling of being un-countried,” but there is no adequate English counterpart. I grew up all over the place, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and still move around frequently. In Québec I’m a francophone who’s adopted English. In British Columbia I hid my French roots. Dépaysement is my natural state of being – it runs through all my work, I’d say.

This is something I’ve discussed prior with Regina-based poet Jérôme Melançon, who composes and publishes poetry separately in English and French. His own writing follows different trajectories, in part due to the poetry of each language often following separate influences. Do you find similar considerations across your work in French or English? Is your writing in one language only, or even predominantly, impacted by writing you’ve read in that language? Or is it simply a difference of the way you think through each language?

I haven’t written enough in French to speak to that alone. But I would absolutely say the French books I read penetrate my poetry in English.

In Québec, especially Montreal, there’s stark differences between French and English poetry when considering structure, style, narratives. The English scene consists predominantly of individual poems, for instance, while collections in French often lose titles altogether, benefitting from a stream-of-consciousness looseness that generates a much more poetic reading experience. I’ve found more resonance with the French collections, stylistically, than with my English contemporaries in book form.

I don’t know Jérôme's work, but I find his practice fascinating, and something I would like to aspire to. I’ve recently begun translating some of my own poems into French and re-translating them into English after some time away, as a sort of creative exercise. I would like to eventually translate my own poetry in full, because yes, the way I think in one language differs from the other entirely. Humour, musicality, syntax, sensation – all changes.

How does a poem begin for you?

I’ve had poems begin with the title. Some with a news article. Some with a single line recycled again and again. “Archipelago,” which is included in the shortlist package for the Bronwen Wallace Award, began with a very simple wordplay-on-title image: a grown up and child passing a paper back and forth beneath a door. “Albedo Effect,” which was finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, has a double origin: while I was quite literally restoring footage of my grandfather installing powerlines in Nunavut sixty years ago, I was also reading a wonderful essay by Nadim Roberts titled “Mangilaluk’s Highway,” about three Inuit boys who fled a residential school and attempted to walk home by following powerlines; only one survived, and the poem is a sort of compression of multiple griefs.

A poem never just forms out of thin air. I don’t believe in that “fleeting inspiration” thing. Sure, I too have been struck by the odd image and thought up a line or two on the spot, and sure, I too will sit down and write with passion for hours at a time because the words are just pouring out of me, but for me those aren’t poems. Those are drafts. The poem comes after, once you’ve chipped away at it, thrown it out entirely, rebuilt it, etc. Even the most commonly-accepted first-draft poems are not first drafts at all. Ginsberg revised “Howl” over long periods. Whitman wrote and rewrote Leaves of Grass forever. The poem is the fruit of tireless labour. And barely any of that labour actually takes place on the page.

I’m curious how you might see your editorial work, whether at yolk or Canto, in conversation with your own writing, if at all. How does your editorial work impact your own work, and vice versa?

I’ve become better at self-editing, that’s for sure. Going through so many submissions you also notice the clichés more, the trends, what people are writing about already, how they’re writing. When I first started as an editor for yolk, I read Canadian journals en masse, to get a sense of what quality to aspire to and what people were publishing. I’ve permitted myself to track down a quote from Hélène Cixous: “Literature itself has read. It doesn’t just arrive like that. It has read. I have read this, this, and this, it says, and it passes itself on.” No attentive reading will ever make you a worse writer. Even the poem within which you see nothing of value tells you, well, okay, this is how not to write. But even then, as an editor, reading something within which I see little value at first becomes an exercise in compassion. Okay, this has meant something to someone; how can I get close to that meaning?

And that practice, in turn, makes you a more compassionate reader of your own work. And this is vital: to be compassionate is to be able to get closer to what literature has read before you,. as Cixous says, to move back in time along that lineage of writing and sit with it, let it sit within you. That is the altruistic value of editorial work. And the editorial conversations I have with other writers are always fruitful. The whole process nourishes my work indirectly, I'm certain. Just allotting the space to engage with other writers daily keeps the poetic spirit dynamic and thinking and ready. Who knows what comes out of that space, and when?

I know you’re scheduled for a residency this fall at the Al Purdy A-Frame. Have you particular plans for your time there?

I’ll be organizing a panel and a workshop on the poetics of wildfire, hopefully with some panelists from across disciplines. In my personal time there, though, I hope I can complete this long, long poem I’ve been developing on my time spent as a wildland firefighter in British Columbia. I’m still not sure what shape it’ll take, whether book-length or chapbook etc., but it’s been in the works for well over a year now... I’d like to get it done while I’m there.

Though I’ll also be taking some time to work on this novel. I’m taking a course right now with the authors Madeleine Thien and Sarah Moss that fittingly enough wraps up the day I get to the residency, so the novel will be fresh in my mind, and I’ll probably make considerable headway on it while there. Though it’s hard to say. I’m particularly excited about the panel, though. My friend Janelle Levesque just spent the month of April there and hid a note for me. Depending on how well she hid it, I might spend a lot of time going through every little crevice in the place. But I might also spend my whole time there walking around the woods and lake. Make some stews. Maybe run into a bear. That’d be time well spent.

 

 

 

 

The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He has garnered the occasional writing and writing activity award, but never a book award.

 

rob mclennan : 2026 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Renato Gandia

Renato Gandia
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

 

Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores the intersections of identity, faith, sexuality, and migration. His poetry won the 2025 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2026 Open Season Awards at The Malahat Review and the 2025 Fiddlehead Poetry Contest. His short stories have appeared in international queer anthologies, and his personal essay appears in Magdaragat. Gandia’s debut portfolio comprises three completed, unpublished manuscripts: his memoir Unpriesting, his poetry collection Eating Rice on Our Feet, and the literary novel Anatomy of Compersion. He and his husband live in Calgary.

The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.

What first brought you to poetry?

I came to poetry through language before I understood it as poetry. I grew up in the Philippines, where language is already textured. Tagalog carries rhythm, repetition, and silence in a very particular way. Even in everyday speech, there’s a kind of compression and implication.

I was actually quite reluctant to write poetry at first. I didn’t know if I had something to say, or if I could say it in a way that mattered. And writing in English made it even more challenging, because it’s not my first language. I was very aware of that distance.

But I kept returning to poetry anyway. When I started writing more seriously, I realized it was the form that allowed me to hold onto that sensibility—to write with restraint, to lean into what can be suggested rather than fully explained. It gave me a way to be indirect, but still truthful.

How did you get from that point to starting to send out work? What did that process look like? Had you any models or mentors?

I came to sending out work a bit indirectly. An essay I wrote was published in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, and through that I met Patria Rivera. She was one of the first people who really encouraged me to take poetry seriously.

At the time, I told her I didn’t write poetry because I didn’t really understand how it worked. Back in the Philippines, one of my closest friends, Niles Jordan Breis, was already an accomplished poet. We had both tried writing poetry earlier on, but I felt like I was too slow to learn the form, and I eventually gave it up. Watching him go on to win awards only made that feeling worse.

But Patria said something that stayed with me—that poetry doesn’t have to begin with mastery, it can begin with expression, and that the precision it demands can be its own reward. That shifted my perspective. I started reading poems more closely, especially in journals, paying attention to how they move and where they go quiet. I began attending workshops, trying to understand the form from the inside out.

One winter, I submitted to a contest at The Confluence Historic Site & Parkland in Calgary, and I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the winners. That was just enough confidence to keep going.

After that, I kept sending work out. Sometimes I’d send poems to Patria and ask her to look them over. She’d come back with suggestions—specific, useful ones—and the work would get stronger. There were many rejections—more than acceptances—but I kept coming back to her voice, and to the memory of standing with seven other poets at the Confluence. I would feel the disappointment, of course, but it usually passed after a few hours. And then I’d return to the work. That persistence, more than anything, is what kept me moving.

How does a poem begin for you?

A poem usually starts with a feeling for me—something that’s been sitting with me for a long time, even if I don’t fully understand it yet. I think of myself as an emotional writer in that sense.

Sometimes that feeling is tied to memory. For example, I wrote a poem about the Second World War in the Philippines, and it began with something very small—I remembered a Japanese dentist who once gave me advice about a malocclusion when I was in Grade Four. That memory stayed with me, and over time it opened into something much larger.

Other times, the starting point is external—a song that moves me, or a film I can’t stop thinking about. I don’t always begin with a clear idea of what the poem is about. It’s usually an emotional response first, and then I follow it—through image, through memory—until something takes shape.

So the process is less about deciding to write a poem, and more about recognizing when something is asking to become one.

Your author biography mentions three unpublished manuscripts: a memoir, a poetry collection and a literary novel. How easy or difficult has it been to work across different forms simultaneously? And do you see any conversation between these works in different forms, or are they, in your mind, completely separate?

The different forms actually emerged at different points in my writing life, though I’ve come to realize they’re all in conversation with each other. I started with the memoir. That was the first manuscript I completed, and I think it came from a need to make sense of lived experience directly—particularly around faith, migration, identity, and queerness.

While I was doing early revisions of the memoir, I enrolled in Gotham Writers Workshop’s short fiction course. I wanted to understand how fiction worked from the inside. Later, I took Fiction II, which focused on novel writing, and that eventually led me to begin working on a literary novel. Fiction gave me a different kind of freedom. It allowed me to explore emotional and relational complexity through invention rather than strict lived experience.

Around that same period, I also began writing poetry more seriously. At first, I didn’t think of myself as a poet at all. But I found there were certain emotions and images that poetry could hold more precisely than prose could. Over time, the poems accumulated into a manuscript of their own.

So, in my mind, the forms aren’t really separate. They’re different ways of approaching many of the same questions—faith, longing, family, desire, belonging. Sometimes a question I can’t answer in memoir reappears in fiction. Sometimes a memory becomes compressed into a poem.

The challenge, of course, is that each form asks for a different rhythm and mindset. Memoir asks for emotional honesty and accountability to lived experience. Fiction requires architecture and patience. Poetry asks for precision and restraint. Moving between them can be difficult, but I also think each form sharpens the others.

What is interesting is in how this suggests you see your work-to-date, or at least these three manuscripts, as part of a single, larger and possibly ongoing project. Is that a fair assessment, or is this an idea that applies only to these three specific works?

I think that’s a fair assessment, though I didn’t consciously begin with the idea of building a larger project. At first, each manuscript felt separate to me because they emerged at different moments and in different forms. But over time, I started recognizing the same emotional and thematic concerns resurfacing across all of them.

When I started writing seriously, I realized I was consistently returning to the perspective of a Filipino gay man navigating faith, migration, family, and identity. Growing up in the Philippines and later immigrating to Canada shaped the way I see the world, and I became interested in bringing Filipino sensibilities into English-language writing—particularly the way emotion, silence, obligation, and tenderness operate in Filipino culture.

I also became aware of how few queer Filipino voices I was encountering in Canadian literature. Not that they didn’t exist, but it felt to me like there was still space for more stories from that perspective—stories with complexity, contradiction, and interiority. I think that awareness naturally began shaping the work I was drawn to across memoir, fiction, and poetry.

So while the forms are different, I do think the manuscripts are in conversation with each other. Sometimes a question I can’t answer in memoir reappears in fiction. Sometimes an emotional experience becomes compressed into a poem. At least right now, they all feel like part of the same ongoing attempt to understand experience through language.

 

 

 

 

The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He recently bested a black bear in hand-to-hand combat, although only through technical foul.

Molly Fisk : Process Note #72

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Molly Fisk are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

My interest in “the west” as a fictional place has been pretty steady since I was a little girl, but a couple of pieces caught my eye in adulthood, and I'll bet they were part of the spark for Walking Wheel. One is Molly Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek, about a single woman homesteader in Oregon, which I loved and sold many copies of when I worked in a bookstore in the 1990s.

The other horrified me: Annie Proulx's short story "Them Old Cowboy Songs" (from her book Fine Just the Way It Is), about a young couple who have a baby and every possible disaster occurs, leaving all of them dead at the end. Right from the get-go, I wanted to describe the incredible amount of work it took to stay alive in this kind of rural terrain, and also have nothing bad happen to my characters.

I'm pretty sure I wrote the first poem after a young woman entered my head in 1998 when I was sitting on a sofa in a rented cottage on Cape Cod with some writer friends. Everyone thinks I must have done a lot of research, but most of what's in here I knew about from reading and living and movies. I did have to double check a few things to verify them, though. I'm horribly likely to think I'm always right.

Someone asked me why I wanted to explore this century and these lives. I'm afraid I never consciously think about where a book is going or what it's exploring. I'm not analytical about the process, or trying to steer. I let things unfold and see what happens.
 

I was noticing some of the skills my friends and I have and regularly use, we who are now in our 60s through 80s, that younger people, and especially city-dwellers, don't seem to have. Making fires in a woodstove, cooking things from scratch, putting up jam, sewing and knitting, repairing. One of my grandmothers taught me a lot, when I'd stay with her in the summer, so I was also thinking of the circumstances under which we learn skills and pass them on.

Nevada City, California, where I've lived for 30 years, is a Gold Rush town, so I'm surrounded by buildings and a landscape that refers to the past, not just for tourists but for those of us who've been here a while and watched it change. Many of us know the trees that were imported by early settlers, grown from seeds someone brought west, like Little-Leaf Lindens, and Mirabelle plums. There's an abiding sense of history running beneath everyday life that I think affected me. Not everyone feels this, but a poet's job is to slow down and notice things, and I think I wanted to recreate the pace of life in an unelectrified, uncomputerized world. The pace and also the effort required.

I purposefully didn't set the book here, it's up in Cedarville, in the Surprise Valley, a place I came across on a road trip and feel oddly attached to. And I set the book after the Gold Rush, so this couple is second-generation, their parents crossed the country in covered wagons, but they were born in Oregon. The Gold Rush ushered in a lot of damage to the people and landscape throughout the west, and I discuss my feelings and decisions about that in an afterword to the book. My lineage is white New Englanders from way back, and Walking Wheel is a likely story about those people, but I'm paying attention to colonialism as a background to it, if not mentioning it specifically in the text.

No individual poems were problematic, the big adventure with Walking Wheel was writing poems sporadically over twenty years without realizing I was writing a book. This is so different from my other poems and essays in subject and tone, I didn't take it seriously for a long time. By the time I figured out it was trying to be a whole book, I had a huge continuity problem.

I'd just sort of written each poem by itself, in my mind, without reference. So I had to go back and try to sort them out, not just for meaning in relation to the one before and the one after, but also to not have summer last for two years, and Phoebe's pregnancy stall out so she was in her third month for several months in a row. My early readers helped a lot with this. Weather, crops, and gestation, those were the problem!

It took me about a year of working this out, some charts on the wall, pages of the book hung up in my kitchen on garden twine as if they were laundry... Luckily, my best friend from childhood was a midwife, so she looked at the book once I got it into a basic order. Instead of correcting things, she gave me a timeline of average pregnancies, so I had to do it myself, which was I'm sure the right thing to do but Lord it was hard. I had the baby doing somersaults in utero long before that would be possible. I also blithely mentioned an herb for tea to be drunk during pregnancy because I liked the sound of its name—at this moment I can't recall which one—and another friend who's a nurse told me this herb can cause miscarriages, and I needed something else.
 

As I was finishing the book and the world was starting to feel more uncertain and dangerous, I thought “well, maybe this story and the slower pace can help people escape, be a distraction.” But it's turned into more than that, as I listen to reader reactions. It's comforting, but it also provides a kind of relief, a reminder about the benefits of work and love. It's a vote for humanity in a time when inhumanity is so prevalent. It is also speaking to men in some way. I've never had so many men tell me they felt seen and loved the story.

What people take away after reading a book is so varied and unpredictable. I didn't set out to say this, but now that the book is done, if I have a wish, it's that readers be reminded love is alive, and work is doable, and sometimes nothing goes wrong. That all is not lost.

 

A Fiddle String

 

Dark inside the house,
as black as the stove pipe's
interior and her eyes wide
as though it were noon.
Dark of the moon, no
moving air at this hour,
too early by far for birdsong.
But in her mind's eye
she can see the softness
of his face in sleep,
how his jaw slackens,
the muscles of temple
and cheek relax. Miles
is a calm man, unhurried
and steady but he can
acquire a certain tension
at times, when the weather
shifts to impede or hurry
his work, when a tree
falls off the mark, akimbo,
or one of the mules won't eat.
He doesn't borrow trouble
but he sees its tracks
and knows its scent.
Approaching fatherhood
has sharpened all his senses,
she thinks. More to be done.
More to protect. He isn't afraid
of the new life, just alert
in a different way. Tuned
like a fiddle string to a higher
note. A scatter of stars now,
through the open window.
They are so far from us,
she thinks. And cold. Why
do they bring me comfort?

 

 

Speculation 

 

What are we naming this child?
Her spine against his ribs
as her front needs half the bed now.
His fingers playing through her hair.
Is it silkier? Her skin
is like moonlight.
My favorite cow was called Bess,
he says. A Jersey.
Her laugh shakes them both
and her belly ripples.
Miles! 

That won't do for a boy,
though, I agree. How about Spike,
if it's a boy? 

SPIKE?

Or Aloysius?

Have you been drinking before
breakfast? Be serious. 

You married an unserious man,
as you may remember.
There's no going back now.
She smiles. The dog yawns
and stretches on the rug, dozing
again, dawn just hinting
at the square shapes of the windows.
None of the virtues, she says. 

What? He'd been thinking of something else.

Patience, Prudence, Constance.
I think they chide a baby. 

How about the sins?
Gluttony Imlay has a nice ring. 

Oh, hush!

Maybe we need another songbird
in the family? But not another pilgrim.
Perhaps the wee one will announce
its name on arrival. 

I've always liked Justin, she says,
if it's a boy.

 

 

The Silence 

 

The clouds have been low all day
and the air biting, sometimes wind
careening down the valley, pine cones
and small branches snapped and dropping
in its wake. Sometimes an uncanny
stillness, but not for long, as though
the weather is of two minds, arguing
with itself. They have fed
and bedded the animals early, with extra
hay for warmth. Bright in his stall calmly
chewing, Lion restive, aware of something
at large in the world and not happy
about it, always the more high-strung.
Miles hopes he'll absorb some of Bright's
equanimity over time, though there
is no evidence of that yet. Chickens
roosting, quiet. The goats wide-eyed.
Miles double-checks the door latches
and brings a shovel with him up to the house.
The shutters have been closed for weeks
against the cold — no chinks of light
shine out to greet him, thankfully.
Their first winter here, together, their first
big storm, he hopes there will be no
unlooked for surprises. Plenty of wood.
As he opens the door, warmth and the smell
of supper hitting him full force, and Phoebe's
half-worried smile, the silence falls —
always a wonder to him. Not an absence
of sound but its own living presence.
The first flakes lightly, sparsely, almost
as if they were dancing, drift down.

 

 

Bathing 

 

On Saturday nights, Phoebe and Miles
take their weekly bath. This is one of the secret
luxuries of marriage: only two bodies
to be cleaned in the steaming water, rather
than the multitudes at home. Phoebe hauls
the first two buckets and builds the fire up
in the stove. The kettles hiss a little
and the cabin’s air gathers humidity. Miles
hauls the next and strips as Phoebe pours
the hot water into her wash tub and refills
the kettles with what he’s carried. Before he
steps in, his body stark white where his clothes
have covered him and acorn-brown at his neck
and forearms which have been bare, Phoebe
pours in another measure of cold. She hands him
a square of the soap she’s made, scented
with mint from her mother’s garden, a cooling odor.
He rubs its harsh surface down his shins and scrubs
his feet, wets arms and chest, shoulders, lathers
the brown hair of his groin and thighs.
Phoebe pours water from the kettles, not fully
hot yet, over his hair, down his back and soaps
and rinses. Gradually his skin loses its deep brown
as grime and the salts of his body are sluiced away,
and his white parts become rosy with heat.
When he is done, she stands ready in her shift.
She empties the kettles into the tub and steps in,
slipping the cotton over her head. While Miles
dries his back and legs he watches the way
she bends and straightens, attending to toes, heels,
under her arms and breasts, the slight moon-shape
her belly makes now, her long white flanks, her face.
He soaps her back for her and pours the rinse water
over her hair twice, three times, her neck arched
back and her eyes closed. These rituals almost
always end in their bed with tongues and minty
fingertips, but not before she has dried herself,
showing him the apple of her bottom and the dark
vee of hair veiling what’s between her legs.
He almost cannot bear the exquisiteness of waiting
as she dries her hair beside the stove, so he walks out
naked to the porch and hurls the cooling wash-water
over the rail.

 

 

 

 

Molly Fisk sent poets into schools state-wide and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel, a novel-in-verse, is just out from Red Hen Press. She lives in California's Sierra foothills.

 

 

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com