Susanne Fletcher : Words, Words, Words

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

I grew up with parents who were avid readers. Neither parent policed my reading and by the time I was twelve I was reading books I found lying around the house – western and crime pulp fiction, science fiction, contemporary fiction of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The vocabulary was frequently out of reach and from my prone place on the couch with a stack of crackers and Velveeta cheese on the coffee table beside me, I would holler “Mom, what does “tipple” mean?” At first, she answered all my questions but eventually her standard reply became, “Look it up in the dictionary.”

In university, a professor chided my use of unconventional words and advised me to use simpler language to achieve greater clarity. This was at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s where all around me ordinary Newfoundlanders created colourful metaphors with ease. (I remember a caller to a radio show who described a local politician as “Lower than an eel in a bucket of snot.”) Maybe I was using words to cover up my metaphoric mediocrity? At any rate, the poems I gravitate towards are written in plain, direct language and use metaphors that make me tingle.

When I retired in 2020, I asked my employer to forego the usual farewell gifts for a cash equivalent. I bought the Canadian Oxford Dictionary – 2^nd edition, a two-inch-thick tome of 1,830 tissue light pages that, when viewed sideways, has alphabetic indents, like stairs, for ease of locating words. On its side, the page edges appear speckled with blue ink, as though a scribe had lost control of her pen. I like the translucent pages that show more words below the word I am looking up which partly describes the way I write poetry. One word leads to another and another and another.

In the Pandemic winter of 2021, I read about Contemporary Verse 2’s (CV2) 2-Day Poem Contest and decided to enter. In preparation, I asked my husband to give me a list of ten unusual words every Saturday morning from which I would generate a poem and submit it to him by midnight Sunday of the same weekend. We began this process in early February so that by the date of the contest at the end of April I was well prepared to make poems out of a list of cranky, unwieldy, archaic, and often polysyllabic words.

A friend chuckled at the exercise saying it reminded her of elementary school vocabulary lists. Immediately I recalled Mrs. MacKenzie, my grade six teacher, who used this tool and required her pupils to write a story using a dozen words of her choosing. I aced that exercise every week.

The exercise proved incredibly fruitful and though I didn’t get close to winning, I had a clutch of poems to work with and submit in the coming years. Three I placed in flo. literary magazine, and one I sent to Bywords in September 2024 – The Right Kind of Unctuous Cream – which was plucked from all the year’s submissions to win the 2025 John Newlove Award.

 

 

 

 

Susanne Fletcher lives in the Ottawa’s south end near Sawmill Creek, one of the many streams that flow into the Rideau River. She walks along the path that follows the creek year-round taking inspiration from what the stream environment delivers. Susanne's short fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction can be found in The New Quarterly, Bywords, flo., Existere, among others.

Kim Fahner : Hag Dances, by Susan Wismer

Hag Dances, Susan Wismer
At Bay Press, 2025

 

 

 

Susan Wismer’s Hag Dances is firmly fastened in earth, stretching its roots back to ancient things that speak of wisdom that’s learned from being close to the natural world. Each poem is like “the new-cracked egg of a just-born day.” Wismer’s series of sonnets, aptly titled “A Crown for the Kitchen,” conjures a redheaded spatula, a brown betty teapot, a saucepan, a pine table, a kitchen window, a corn broom, and a chipped cup. The kitchen becomes a centre point for conversation, the sharing of stories between generations of women, and the sacred place where magic enters the equation. Crone wisdom is present in this crown of sonnets and artfully weaves itself through the other poems in Hag Dances.

There’s witchy wisdom here as Wismer highlights the power of the natural world. Nothing is without spirit or soul. Everything—from weather and seasonal changes, to trees, rocks, birds, and animals—has a sacred purpose. In “Night Vision,” she writes of autumn leaves that “crumble, whisper/under three stars, white bands of cloud” and of trees whose “hands reach naked/through moon’s falling light//their prayers constant, implacable, rising.” In “Invocation,” the speaker’s voice is that of a wise woman who is depicted in the first stanza as a blurry watercolour that is reminiscent of the mythic Macbeth witches: “Black shawl scry mutter/stone spellbag herbs potions/boil iron cauldron,” but then changes point of view in the second stanza: “I am bent-fired on broomstick/in cackling flight/through obsidian nights.” In the final two stanzas, written in italics, a spell blooms so that the crone voice calls out, entreating Hecate to listen: “Hear me beat, beat away/at the imperilled heart/of the Anthropocene.” That speaker’s voice embodies the overall tone and theme of the book in its awareness of the importance of the natural world, and the rhythms of life—including the seasons of living, aging, and dying. This poem’s spell works at wishing away the negativity of the Anthropocene, reminding readers that there is always hope, even on the darkest days.

History speaks in Hag Dances, in poems like “Dresden Cup,” which traces the provenance of three china cups and saucers that initially sit by the side of a war-torn Polish road in 1943—"spare beauties of smooth rounded shape/some hesitant hand/brushed paint    over porcelain” but are carried by a woman “all through that war/scalpel and morphine/her doctor-hands bloodied” to England in 1945, and then used again in Canada in 2025. Artifacts of humanity pass through times of war and peace, telling stories of family history through a matrilineal line. In “Spirits,” Wismer reflects on her “stubborn Scottish pride” when she speaks of “ancestors made of madness” who were evicted by the Highland Clearances. Ghosts, they “appear in bagpipes, old rubber boots,/dance on worn kitchen floors” as “language lilts/shadows” and “ghost Gaelic traces lift” off a “flat English tongue.” In the various Celtic traditions, ancestors are as real as living people, so it makes sense that Wismer considers how time works in a lifetime, and through centuries. The veils or borders that exist between worlds and dimensions, but also between the lines that mark out generations of relatives, are thin. 

The notion of pilgrimage is present in the collection, with references to travel and to the Camino de Santiago, and mention of a world that is “already shattered/and still breaking.” Whether focused on the threat that exists to a single woman walking on dark city streets in “Walk Home,” or on the fawn that lies hurt on the road in “North of Verona, Canoe Lake Road,” with the man who “has fawn fur on his hands” when he returns from moving it to temporary safety before it dies, Wismer creates the extended metaphor of life as a pilgrimage, where the worth is in the journey, not necessarily in the destination.

Hageography, the last section in Hag Dances, plays with the meaning behind the word “hagiography,” which may refer to a biography that puts a person in a very flattering light, or may also refer to the study of saints or venerated people. In this case, the pun comes in on the image and symbol of what a hag stereotypically represents. Wismer writes of crones who are wise women, not women who have been demeaned by western society and culture. These are not crones who are feared, but oracles who offer wisdom to those who seek them out.

The figure of a bain sidhe (banshee) shows up in the poem “At the Crossroads,” where her image is described beautifully as being “cloaked in pale folds/of dark winter’s coming/rock water sky” and that her arrival is shown as a “dance to the glisten of sleet/frozen earth/keen skirl of hawk cries.” Rather than being portrayed as a terrifying being who carries the dying one off in her arms, as the banshee is usually depicted, this portrayal links her power and beauty to the spirit of the land, weather, and seasonal shifts. Hags, crones, witches, or wise women—no matter what you call them—honour the passage of time and growth. In “A Starker Form of Art,” the speaker writes of learning to “love angles, sharp elbows,/Straighter lines in the shapes of my age” and notes that they are “alive in the flesh of my own slow/dissolving, blurred lines through/my eveningtime eyes.” The body of the speaker becomes the “starker form of art” as “it dances a gradual/descent towards Earth.” Aging is no longer to be feared, but rather seen as a proof of wisdom that’s been gathered over time.

Hag Dances is Susan Wismer’s joyous poetic spell of celebration, of noticing how words and poems become magical incantations that remind readers of how time shifts and moves, how the natural world offers us solace through difficult times, and how humans are only here for a short while. The wisdom isn’t far from the noticing and mindfulness, and the peace is still possible in the times of war. The poems in this collection remind this reviewer of Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude or The Enchanted Life, books that recall ancient mythical stories that speak to where women fit into the natural and elemental worlds of fire, earth, sky, and water. Hag Dances speaks to women as they gain knowledge and wisdom as they age—offering something to share with those who come afterwards.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Margaryta Golovchenko : The Character Actor Convention, by Guy Elston

The Character Actor Convention, Guy Elston
Porcupine’s Quill, 2025

 

 

 

It takes getting to the collection’s titular poem, which is located at about the halfway point of the collection, to feel the depth of Guy Elston’s poetic vision really sink in. For The Character Actor Convention, Elston’s debut poetry collection, this moment is akin to a lightbulb, not quite an aha so much as it is the smugness of satisfaction when witnessing a writer in full control of a narrative carefully guide their reader where they want them to go. Like the titular poem, in which “‘we’ and ‘they’ blend”, The Character Actor Convention is like stepping into a circus tent, expecting only to laugh but quickly finding a sobering and moving edge to what was billed as light entertainment. One is left feeling amused and troubled in equal measure.

Let us start with the entertainment, then, the peanut butter to the pill. Elston’s skill in finding opportunities for puns and wordplay is undeniable, even unmatched, as far as my recent recollections of poetry collections I have read. It’s been a while since I laughed at something witty and silly as a poem about water, in which hydrogen speaks to oxygen as if to a former lover or a best friend who is now more of an enemy: “O, you’re an asshole. But O,/ when we were fresh,/ when we flowed…”. Poems like “Test Subject”, which is written from the perspective of a sunflower, and “Halloween Training for Horses”, which speaks to the horses receiving “spooky training”, are entertaining in their vision while revealing a tenderness to their respective nonhuman subjects.

For those who, like myself, get their kick from general cultural nerdiness, Elston also has the bases covered. A litany of historical and cultural figures litter the pages of The Character Actor Convention, among them Joan of Arc, Tutankhamun, and Saint Augustine, while a bunch more find their consolidated home in “For a Great Time.” “Funerary Mask” is a gathering of cultural and literary references held together by material culture dimension due to its physicality, as the speaker is carefully itemized/anatomized. Other instances delighted me as an art historian, from the updated “rip-off” of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1912 manifesto that under Elston’s hand became “A Drop in the Bucket of Public Waste”, to the line “in Late Antiquity alone,/ or the Mediterranean Pagan-Christian/ Intermediary Period, as my department/ was last rebranded” in “The Dream Historian’s Dream”, which made me laugh and groan in equal measure for its tongue-in-cheek truthfulness.

The moment of sobriety, then, comes with the poems “Home Sick” and “Three-Star Resort”. Grounded in reality, where “Beauty is not/ an ideal in my country, but a taxpayer-funded, licensed service” and “A thin towel” stands “between a reserved lounger and chaos”, these poems read like glimpses behind a curtain to reveal an Oz-ian truth. In these moments, the world takes on the quality of a fantasy and disassociation kicks in, much as it does with “The Character Actor Convention”. These are the moments where Elston’s humour takes on a comforting, even quasi-prophetic, quality. When history and culture combine, crashing against each other like tectonic plates, it is the dash of the playful and the speculative that put things into perspective, not to placate but to impart sobriety.

 

 

 

 

 

Margaryta Golovchenko (she/her) is an art historian, poet, and critic currently based in Calgary, on the ancestral land of the Siksikaitsitapi – Blackfoot Confederacy. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently Daughterland (Anstruther Press, 2022).

Patrick O’Reilly : Two poems

 

 

 

THE INVENTION OF THE EXTINCTION OF THE AUK

The imagination kindles and memory
scrolls through its rolodex of gifs, finds 

Auk: pencil drawing of a bird
resembling a cross between a penguin, 

Toucan Sam, and your high school boss.
A hawk fucked up by a child’s fat crayon. 

Ceci n’est pas l’auk,
n’est-ce pas? 

If you saw the auk today, you’d stroke.
That corridor’s blocked with brick and sheaf on sheaf 

of histories that read: The Auk Is Dead.
Well-clogged, all neural pathways to the auk. 

The death of the auk, like the loss of the Hood,
is something that doesn’t happen anymore; 

if anything, it happens less and less:
the death of the auk is dying out. 

The dying auk—as quick as the name is spoke
she’s gone again. Flightless, she has flown 

backwards through time, taking
the part of your brain that has known 

the awkward thing. You’ve seen the hearts
the last two hearts, saved for study, 

their antique tags, their ventricle roots.
Strange vegetable.

 

 

 

CRYPTID TRIPTYCH #3

Fiji Mermaid 

We’ve come enamoured with disgust,
daring each other to touch
its skin. Even from the mezzanine,
you’d call it fake. Don’t mean much:
the crossing of dissimilars
dives us into something rich
and strange. Strangeness we are shown
waxed into every sewn stitch. 

 

Jackalope

Some things aren’t easy to explain
even after they’ve been caught
and killed. For example, the pain
some creatures live with.
                                     Plain “pot
meet kettle meet vampire bat”
bullshit. Suffering doesn’t make
special things more special. Still,
look at it for skill-work’s sake:
perfect parody of nature’s
no-idea-but-in-things.
We are what we’re afflicted with:
heft of horn, width of wing.

  

Babe of Ravenna

Proto-Mothman, your baffling
birth preceded the grim Sack
of Ravenna, and for some
that meant that it foretold. Sum sac 

tribulatio! groaned your mother,
marking how a vulture’s claw
scraped blood from her tender breast,
down scales toward a messy maw 

as one eye watched from your single
shin. Your body was sin and sin again.
Priests painted you red, then stomped you flat. 

Medicine was like that then.

 

 

 

 

Patrick O’Reilly is a poet from Renews, NL, and a research monitor for the Hearn Institute for Fractal Nissography. Patrick is responsible for two chapbooks: A Collapsible Newfoundland (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) and Demographics Report, November 2023 (Cactus Press, 2024).