Heidi Elder : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Brandi Bird

 

Brandi Bird [photo credit: Geoffrey Wallang] is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, the Tsleil-Waututh, and the Musqueam peoples (Surrey, B.C). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (Anansi, 2023), won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert and the Governor General’s awards. Brandi Bird is currently completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Their latest book is Pitiful (Anansi, 2026).

Brandi Bird reads in Ottawa alongside Declan Ryan and Stephanie Bolster at The Manx Pub Plan 99 event on Saturday, March 28, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

You mention in your “Acknowledgements” that Pitiful’s “skeleton” was written in only two months. What was it about those two months that allowed the collection to take form? How does Pitiful fit in with the rest of your work and what is new and/or exciting about it for you?

I wrote the first draft of the long poem “Post-Memory” in one very sleepless night in the spring of 2024. I didn’t have the intention of starting a new book of poetry and was more interested in writing fiction and personal essay, two genres I’m trying to get a better grasp of. The freedom I felt when I removed the identifier of “poet” from my egoic makeup and just started “doing shit” made it possible for me to follow my obsessions to their end.

I’ve been recovered (which for myself means abstinent from all behavioural aspects of bulimia) since 2018, and I’ve been trying to write about appetite, desire, and control for my entire life (unsuccessfully). It wasn’t until I spat out “Post-Memory” that I understood I was finally prepared to face the ugliness and shame at the heart of most of the choices I’ve made in my life to simply survive our world.

Pitiful marks a new direction for me in my poetic practice because I wrote it without the resentment I felt editing my first book. When I started writing as an adult in 2016, I was confused about who I was writing for and how to make myself legible to that imaginary audience. I ended up hating my audience until I recognized the “audience” was actually an effigy I’d crudely sewn together of myself. When I revisit The All + Flesh, I feel the undercurrent of smouldering resentment and genuine care and love that I put into it. Pitiful was an effort to celebrate the rage and disgust I’ve worked my entire life to bury. I dug out its rotten, diseased corpse and decided to bring it into your bedsheets proud as a cat with a dead rat. 

To borrow again from your “Acknowledgements,” you mention that the poems began “unconcerned with anyone’s approval or understanding” but your own; yet you also mention its position amongst pop culture, history, and other writers. How does the collection balance these two boundaries, or rather, does it dwell in the overlap? Where does the reader stand now, for you, in response to a collection published in this vein?

I don’t think there are boundaries between myself and the images, texts, and historical contexts I’ve studied or experienced at all. I’ve cultivated my eye and taste and methods for analysis through a lifetime of obsession and curiosity. I change my mind all the time through a constant practice of integration and reintegration. All knowledge overlaps. My audience is anyone who will listen or read a pull quote while bored scrolling through their Instagram feed. I finally don’t feel the crushing responsibility to create a knowable or legible persona.

I am not an Indigenous poet. I am a poet who is Indigenous and comes from that historical legacy, but I’m also a weird, perverted bitch, and I’ve studied whiteness for my entire life. Every native person has too. I’m someone who is a clone of a clone of a clone of every cool, edgy and/or serious writer I’ve admired. I didn’t even know Indigenous people could be poets until I met Katherena Vermette at an Indigenous Writer’s Circle group when I was 17. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me.

When I read Liz Howard’s and Jordan Abel’s work in 2016, I copied their voices until I developed my own monstrous intensity and ethos. I grew up a citizen of the early internet, posting on LiveJournal and then Tumblr. I learned about sex by exploring gay erotic fanfiction at way too young an age and posted underage “thinspo” to LJ communities created to inspire weight loss. I was an active poster on forums for girls who ostensibly weren’t pro-anorexia/bulimia, but we still inevitably triggered each other.

Pop Culture has the power to reinforce and revise history, and Blade Runner or Succession or Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me the writer I am, regardless of their artistic quality. Roman Roy is just as important to me as Sylvia Plath because disgust and fascination drive my work more than any other emotional states. 

To further expand on the concept of intertextuality, several of your poems reference depictions of eating disorders within television. What does it mean for your work to exist within and be shaped by a web of pop culture references? These poems “Notes on…” often include a dedication; what will prompt you to dedicate one poem over another? What does it mean for you to write for/about/within your communities and then share in this way?

The “Notes on…” poems are less about textual depictions of eating disorders on television and more about the fantastical construction of appetite, power, and sexuality that I’ve built within those men. They’re poems about masculinity written explicitly to counteract the “girl-ification” of suffering in literature/media about eating disorders. I mean, I don’t think I’ve been treated like a girl anywhere in this world since I grew tits and started smoking cigarettes at the ripe old age of thirteen (unless girlhood includes getting detained at fifteen for solicitation and on suspicions that I was dealing crack from my bike in downtown Winnipeg).

The “Notes on…” poems are cheeky things, little humiliation rituals for myself, as much as they are for other fans of these fictional men too, these terribly sad “babygirls,” these first crushes and sad loverboys whom women and girls and women-who-were-never-actually-women-at-all project themselves onto.

The poems are coated in disgust and fascination and desire and envy and ugliness. They get to the core of what I’m trying to say in Pitiful while also being fun as hell to read to a group of people. I simply dedicated each poem to a friend who shares a love for the respective fandoms I’m gesturing towards. They know why!

 

 

 

 

Heidi Elder (she/her) is a writer and editor from Ottawa, Ontario. She has edited for Understorey Magazine, Common House Magazine, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She currently works for CANREADS and is on the board of VERSe Ottawa. Her work has appeared in VISTAS (Vol. 41), Polar Expressions (Seaside, 2024), Echolocation (Vol. 23), Generation (forthcoming), and more.

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.