rob mclennan : Ribgrass, Poems by Nicole Mae

Ribgrass, Poems, Nicole Mae
Peachpiles, 2026

 

 

 

I was intrigued to see Bronwen Wallace-shortlisted Saskatchewan poet Nicole Mae’s self-produced Ribgrass, Poems (Peachpiles, 2026), supported by SK Arts, and a title that apparently follows their prior full-length collections Youth (2018) and Screaming Sweet Nothings (2019). Opening with the short title poem, Ribgrass, Poems extends across eight sections of short poems and erasures—“SUMMER,” “AUTUMN,” “WINTER,” “SPRING,” “NYÁR,” “ÖSZ,” “TÉL” and “TAVASZ”—as Mae writes through first-person observational lyrics and the occasional erasure to articulate landscape and the body, including precise moments through heartbreak, misadventure, desire and chronic illness. Mae’s self-description in their author biography includes: “Their poems, films, and artworks reflect themes of nostalgia, longing, Hungarian diaspora, prairie queerness, ill body, shame, and romantic love.” As the title poem begins: “I stand in a pasture. / Dry winds scarf my throat. / Humid meadows / taste / knees. // Bend. / Dove sky / into olive grass.” There’s a delicate intimacy, a smallness, to the approach of Mae’s lyric, one attuned very close to the physical landscape of their southwest Saskatchewan. As the acknowledgments for the collection includes: “Ribgrass was created on Treaty 4 Territory—the land of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Nations, as well as the Homeland of the Métis Nation. This work recognizes the deep relationship between land, water, and community, and it honours their enduring stewardship.”

Cloxacillin

I decided not to tell you
that I’ve started antibiotics again. 

I eat them with a runny yolk, tinfoil potatoes,
and terror.

There are ways that Mae’s poems offer themselves as a loose sequence or assemblage of short lyric scenes, extending their way across the larger landscape of the full collection. Listen to the thread of the short poem “Fresh Cream Warm Cashmere,” that reads: “Every morning, / I put on a coconut and sandlalwood perfume. // I spritz my neck and both wrists, / then let it marinate into skin. // Wihin quiet moments, / I think of you. // I wonder if this fragfrance has travelled by wind / to your doorstep.” Working through memory and observation, these poems do offer themselves as the landscape of their narrator, from how the experience of geography can’t help but impact how one develops, reacts and thinks, and how illness can’t help but impact upon the landscape of the body. There is a looseness to this collection, and at times an unevenness, that might provide comparisons more to a day-book or poetic journal, over, say, a highly-crafted poetry collection. The poems exist in conversation with each other across a far larger structure, one might think, offering moments across this particular landscape, some clipped and exact, while others across a rougher ground, all the while attending that same quiet precision.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan has a new poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press), as well as shiny new chapbooks through Subpress Collective and Broke Press. The late Gord Downie once recommended his second full-length collection, bury me deep in the green wood (ECW Press, 1999), so that was cool.

 

Cat Tyc : FEELINGS ARE FREE

 

 

 

Lately I have been looking at a lot of artwork made by veterans to excavate their trauma for a new job and I am visioning what they see more and more in my pure view. I wake up to the consistent one - it is of the horizon line usually at the base of a body of water. The sea so calm and the sun so high that it burns with a rageful peace and then often through the drawings one will notice a movement of the sun getting lower in wait of an imminent horror. Sometimes they draw the horror so psychedelic it almost seems fun like the first dip on the rollercoaster but secretly we know it is not that. For now, you are there in my view so high but shifts move my ability which alters the gaze. These moments become a  reminder you will be further and further until only imagined soon, in memory and the imminent so mysterious in how bad it could actually be. We can pretend like nothing but know we are lying to the air in ourselves. A little white lie becomes a horror film so quickly like rot, like fear. It burns until it fades. I want to take back the pieces I knowingly broke off and in the past would say ‘I want to have them back’ but not this time because this time in the giving, I did not give over myself . Take them, they’re so yours. My heart is a plate and I want to give you food.

If it were always today, I would feel still like the sea in the mind of the veteran holding onto the calm they clung to out of fear of the unknown worst. The part when it gets hard. The part where nothing will ever be the same and you just get used to it. The slight buzz that never leaves of nothing that goes nowhere will return and I did not miss it. Sometimes I don’t want to go home. More ease in being away from the source but also amenable to the whatever happens next phenomena of being out in a world potentially determined to destroy you for no other reason than a rich person’s desire to have more blanketed in an ideology they don’t even mean but maybe you did once. Neither of us know what we are doing anymore but we keep waking and going. You wake for the boom, and bake in the sun. Once we were toddlers and then for the rest of time we are what happened to us. All spring, you told me the inevitable like a feedback loop on a broken machine and I just kept praying it would finally stop playing. Maybe we could throw it out.  The sun has become so intense, I can only squint which narrows the horizon to a strobing of red as I wait for it to happen and wonder What if there is no explosion, what if there is only dust?

 

 

 

 

Cat Tyc is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores such questions as: Why do we relate the way that we do? What is explicit in the implicit? In dialogue with others and herself, her work explores these questions in text, video, performance and installation.

She has three chapbooks, An Architectural Seance (dancing girl press & studio), CONSUMES ME (Belladonna* Collaborative) and I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME (Blush Lit) and a book of poetry, XO (The Ether Agency). Her most recent writing has been published in Maggot Brain, The Recluse, Shock of the Femme, Touch the Donkey, FENCE, Brooklyn Rail, American Museum of Paramusicology and the WITCH anthology by Dopamine Books.

She has presented and performed at the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Kassel Fest and the synthesis gallery in Berlin. She has directed music videos that have been added to the rotation on LOGO’s NewNowNext and MTVu. Her first solo exhibition, SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS, was presented at Tanja Grunert gallery in 2022.

On WGXC/90.7 Wave Farm, she hosts MISSIVES TO THE ETHER where she interviews artists and writers about their relationship to creativity and spirit and then reads their tarot on air. She also has a Substack of the same name.

She has been granted residencies and fellowships at Signal Culture, The Flaherty Seminar, Spruceton Inn, and Mass MOCA and has received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.

She lives in Hudson, NY and is currently studying to become a licensed art therapist at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Gregory Crosby : Stephen Dobyns 1941-2026

 

 

 

 

The poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns died on June 14, at the age of eighty-five; I’d always admired the way he conducted his career, funding his poetry with a series of detective novels set in Saratoga Springs. In moments when my own poetic vocation seemed a mug’s game, I would think, “Well, I can always write detective fiction, just like Dobyns.” But as enjoyable as the adventures of private investigator Charlie Bradshaw are, it was Dobyns’ poems that made the biggest impression on me, particularly Cemetery Nights, published in 1987 and a book I devoured that year at the age of twenty, when I was just beginning an effort to read living, contemporary poets, even though I didn’t yet understand I would be joining those ranks (I was still trying to write fiction).

Part of the reason the poems in Cemetery Nights spoke so directly to me was for that very reason: they were narrative and fantastical, often beginning with a bold, aphoristic statement (Some people but their trust in art, other/ believe in murder. Each can be in error.) or a not entirely rhetorical question (When are we satisfied or get what we want,/ when do we speak the truth of our feelings?) that the poem would unfold almost as a fable, but in a dry, clear-eyed tone that was irresistible to me, each lengthy, single stanza carried along long-limbed pentameter-busting lines with a confidence and calm that seemed easy. Dobyns rarely breaks up the stanza, so it’s almost as if walking through a spacious gallery while listening to someone tell you something in an urgent whisper, something important, but never raising their voice to get the point across.

The poems wear their dream logic lightly in order to drop their gravitas unexpectedly into the reader’s lap. A man is imprisoned by magic in a black walnut tree only to be carved into a mermaid in a little allegory of art (“The Mermaid”); the last Pony Express rider waits even now for a man to declare his love by letter, though of course the man doesn’t (“Pony Express”); God retires to “a little brick cottage/ in the vicinity of Venus” where he laments with his buddy the Devil that really he should have just stuck to gardening (“The Gardener”); in the title poem, the dead rise and insist on doing all the things they did when they were alive, even though their rotting bodies are falling apart. A wry melancholy coats everyone in these poems, but it rarely overwhelms them—Dobyns’ impulse to storytelling always shrugs it off with a whaddyagonnado shrug and images that hit heart and head like little arrows, as in the ending of “Street Corner Romance”:

                                         ...You see, we are no good
          in emotional isolation. Even a tire iron yearns
          for a steely mate, and love, what is love but
          that dark reflecting lake that any creature
          may have the good or ill-fortune to glance into. 

(I love the unobtrusive, but felt, internal slant-rhyme of mate/lake.)

Re-reading Cemetery Nights brought back vivid memories of the pleasure I first took in the collection, a pleasure in surreal narrative I later found in James Tate as well. When I picked up a much later book, Winter’s Journey (2010), I found that Dobyns’ long line and tone remained intact, and if anything more personal—the anger with the “low, dishonest decade” of the Naughts courses through these poems, that wry melancholy now tinged with bitter bewilderment, and, in poems like “Napatree Point,” prescience: ...And I’m/ still no closer to understanding how to live in a country/ that’s become an embarrassment... Same, Stephen, same.

Around the turn of the century, I met Stephen Dobyns after he gave a reading, and was able to tell him how much I’d liked Cemetery Nights, and how some of the rhetorical stances in those poems informed my own later practice; he accepted my awkward praise with graciousness, and we sipped our post-reading reception wine. And now he’s dead. How difficult to be an angel./ In order to forgive, they have no memory./ In order to be good, they’re always forgetting./ How else could heaven be run?

 

 

 

 

 

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018).

Mrityunjay Mohan : on Pillars of Sand

 

 

 

 

I began writing the poem in 2021, a year after my father’s death, and a year before I began my medical transition. The poem was meant to remain as a relic from a period in my life I wasn’t comfortable with recording in any other way. It could only be detailed through the voice of another person, a child, a shadow of myself from years past cast onto the present. A part of me, however unintentional, was infused into the poem, and it took on a life of its own. The red bird was formed in part when I was still a child, already aware of what it means to possess an innate difference in the way I experienced and interacted with the world. The boy was formed even before.

When I was around eight or nine, my parents brought two pairs of birds home. I had never wanted to have birds as pets, but my parents weren’t aware of that, and since I had pestered my parents for a pet, they bought the four birds from a local pet shop. It was from the insistence of my father that resulted in the choice of four birds and two betta fish. As a child, I rarely thought of birds in captivity, and I was consumed by the notion that flying was the closest thing to freedom one could ever get. Having the ability to disappear entirely from the ground, even if only for fleeting moments, was particularly enticing.

In the days since bringing the birds home, I developed a notion that the birds had to leave the cage, and despite my initial disinterest, I grew fond of the birds soon after their arrival. They were allowed to leave the cage and roam the house when my parents were at home. I attempted to train the parrots, but I was impatient and undetermined, and I had already surrendered to the birds’ inevitable departure or eventual escape.

I had believed that any entrapment of a bird’s ability to fly was always temporary, as long as the bird remained uninjured, that they would always find a way to return to the sky in some capacity. The possibility of eternal captivity eluded me until I was faced with four birds looking at me through the bars of a cage, perched atop a piece of metal, its existence experienced entirely in captivity. These birds, I realized, had never had the chance to exist in a world that wasn’t concealed behind steel bars, and they might not even remember or understand freedom. The birds, if released into the wild, might not even survive. Their existence was experienced entirely through what could be seen from within the cage. I realized escape from captivity wasn’t always a guaranteed outcome, and as much as books and movies had me believe in the inevitability of an escape, I knew such a certainty did not exist.

As I watched the birds inside that cage, I began to view captivity in a profoundly different manner, their wings still large enough to sustain flight, unclipped, and yet any opportunity to escape did not guarantee freedom or ability to survive in the wild. The isolation of being trapped seemed worse than the loss of free movement. I viewed the captivity I felt in my own body differently as well. Their isolation felt reminiscent of my own confinement in a body I couldn’t yet understand. I imposed, unintentionally, my own feelings of desolation onto the caged birds. Although I could never know what they must have felt inside that cage, I felt kinship with the confined beings, and it allowed me an opportunity to understand myself.

It was around this time that I began reading more poetry at the library, and formed a vague and child-like idea of freedom that I had tied to my own oppressive captivity in a body that felt alien to me. In an attempt to make myself human, to feel some sense of a lurking freedom in a faraway future, I began to reshape my feelings into ideas I could capture from around me. I could see myself as a bird inside a cage, a mind unable to withhold the entrapment of an unchanging body. That was when the red bird was formed, although it wasn’t a red bird then, and it had no real story attached to its existence.

Although I no longer had to view my experience in fragments, I wanted to write about it from the perspective of a child that wasn’t allowed to have a childhood. When the birds finally escaped, I was not the one who had left the cage unlocked. Still, I watched the sky waiting for a glimpse of the birds from outside my house, the cage left on the ground beside me, open.

 

 

 

Mrityunjay Mohan is a queer, trans, writer of color. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Indianapolis Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Fourteen Hills. He’s a Tin House scholar, Lambda Literary fellow, and a Brooklyn Poets fellow. He was a recipient of the Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference.