Emma McKenna : How Does a Poem Begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

I want to tell you about the body / where the hurt / heat / hate resounds. I want you to notice the fulsome expanse of trying to right / re-right / rewrite. I want to ask you about the part / where the flesh / flush / fear resides. I want to ask – did I hurt you? If so, where? And obviously, the return / rerun / relapse of when. When did the incident become an image and how does the image turn into sound. Can I show you what shapes must do to shake like noise. The echo of representation feels good in the mouth. A throaty reflux / reflex / rest. Have you heard memories hold / heave / hover. I want to tell you about the body / watch me wind up.

 

 

 

 

Emma McKenna (she/her) is a multidisciplinary feminist writer with a PhD in English & Cultural Studies. She is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Star (Book*hug Press, 2026) and Chenille or Silk (Caitlin Press, 2019). She is bi, disabled, and grew up poor/working-class. Web: emmamckenna.com Insta: @emmamckennawrites

 

 

Kim Fahner : UNMET, by stephanie roberts

UNMET, stephanie roberts
Biblioasis, 2025

 

 

 

UNMET, the second collection of poetry by stephanie roberts, asks readers to consider what sorts of things are “unmet” in their own lives. Perhaps it is to do with expectations, with how humans tend to disappoint themselves when they have expectations that don’t come to fruition. Perhaps we are not able to meet one another with clear communication, or see our desires blossom into something tangible. A reading of UNMET leaves a reader considering what parts of their life have yet to be discovered, and what has missed or lost and not yet been found.

The book hosts a series of titular poems (with the word “unmet” referenced) that are placed throughout the collection, so that the reader is never really allowed to stray from consideration of what it is that is missing. If humans live too much in the longing and seduction of what the future holds, they miss what’s going on around them. The climate crisis is present here, in poems like “Catch a Falling Knife,” as the speaker refers to forest fires in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, where “Western wildfires bathe British Columbia,/soap its armpits in smoke/and carelessness.”  It is present, as well, in “Entanglement,” when roberts writes, “somewhere off the coast of orange county California,/the grandest animal that has ever lived swims tangled/in a fishing line,” and “in ottawa, on the fourth floor, near the rear atrium/of the canadian museum of nature, i sit/in the chamber of a blue whale’s heart, weeping.” The reader is left to ponder about whether it’s just too late, and whether other desired expectations can even be met if the world ends because of human greed. This idea can be shifted from macro to micro, from universal to particular, as it might be reflected in relationships between humans, or even between humans and the natural world.

There’s a distinct current of conversation in UNMET—between friends and lovers, between humans and the earth and water and sky, between past/present/future, between family members, and between well known musicians. In “Lady Fine is for Sugar,” the poet recollects a conversation with their grandmother, how she would say “You are well, not fine. Fine is for sugar!” and referencing the feminist strength of Cardi B who “levitated up a stripper pole/like a fuckin’ phoenix against the stench/of respectability politics.” Later, in one of the Unmet poems that appears early in the collection, roberts writes of how Marilyn Monroe “had this radiation,/nakedness was her tongue of fire,” but during church services, would force “smaller self against the world.” The reader is left thinking about how women can either increase or decrease their light for the good of themselves or others, and depending on what society requires for them to be successful. The notion of wearing masks, and of dialing down the intensity of desire or expectation even, is a way of not being true to self or identity. The systems within which we live, as humans—as women, as well—are ones that require study and navigation, but which also need to be subverted and rewritten.

A reader will find both glints of specificity and simplicity, as well as complexity in UNMET, just as they will in life’s journey. “Ordinary” times that existed before the arrival of Covid, seem to wobble and tip precariously, and roberts’s pandemic poems speak to the ways in which a current event or happening like “Monday quiet and empty streets,” nudge us into remembering “spring 2020/with all our suffering.” Loss was fiercely rooted in an unprecedented lockdown period when everyone was forced to go within, to the loss of the poet’s father, someone “taking leave in the midst of disaster.” Loss cannot be avoided, is woven into the way life shifts across the page of time and space, so the reader is reminded that the two ways of being—within presence and absence—are too intertwined to separate.

roberts’s poetic imagery is crystalline and vibrant, drawing the reader in with its uniquely surreal consistency. So many lines and phrases sing, including ones like: “In an empty apartment, you butter/A sandwich on both sides with daydreams,” “Wearing a lightweight twill jacket,/a woman walks out the door with her life,” and “A woman orders rose-shaped pink/pleasure with courage for tomorrow.” Lines like these are hypnotic, inviting readers to consider how a seemingly simple image can bloom into a brilliant metaphor.

Be assured: the sparkler on the cover is not the most important thing about stephanie roberts’s UNMET, but the image becomes a metaphor for the temporality of life’s journey. Humans strive so intensely for what lies ahead—maybe dreaming of “better times” or of expectations that might be met—but in so doing, often miss out on the reality that is life in the present. Nothing, no matter how much we might want it to be, is “perfect,” but if we focus more on the present instead of the past or future, we will ruin our lives “a number of times by wanting.” UNMET, when finished, leaves the reader with more questions and thoughts, evaluating longings and appearances, pondering how to best meet the world with thoughtfulness and compassion.

 

 

 

 

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.

Alex Deng : Intrusive Thoughts: A Review of Chris Hutchinson’s Lost Signal

Lost Signal, Chris Hutchinson
Palimpsest Press, 2025

 

 

 

Throughout Chris Hutchinson’s Lost Signal (Palimpsest Press, 2025), Hutchinson has one ear to the ground: “[b]eneath this rust- / red trestle bridge, the river froths / and foams,” and the other ear to “the virtual edge of this screen.” And, seemingly, these two ears are deliberately placed in the virtual and actual, causing the signals in these poems to be lost—as the title suggests. Mimicking a brain bombarded by constant Tik-Tok refrains and news headlines, these poems move and play in a way that only someone attuned to the language of the internet can move. Filled contrasts such as “hills like fluffy clouds” and “Exxon Mobil / logos,” Hutchinson manages, within one poem and within the book, to expertly place these soundbites of information—clouds and logos, skin and steel—beside each other, both in argument and conversation.

In the titular poem, Lost Signal, Hutchinson wants “you” to

Ping me with your promises
from decades down the tracks.
Sing me to sleep.
Tonight, I’m a surgeon
cutting myself open
with the virtual edge of this screen. 

[...]

You’re just radio waves.
I’m the touch of a touchscreen
away. Please reply before I fall asleep
again. Promise to write my name
on the crumbling Empire’s sky 

with your spire-like pen.

This initial poem captures the major gestures and movements made throughout the book, but also gets to what I think is the most important idea Hutchinson explores, which is person-to-person connection, whether it be as resistance, or as love (is there a difference between those two?). Beyond the timely and important discussions of the “crumbling Empire” and the “spire-like pen,” suggesting that the pen is no longer mightier than a sword but has become a spire, there’s a deep exploration of how to truly connect in a world that’s always so connected, maybe too connected.

Hutchinson wants this “you,” maybe us readers—or another “you” that I’m not sure of——to be there for the speaker, to “sing them to sleep,” but they’re “radio waves,” a wavelength without colour. This “you” is “just a touchscreen away” but completely invisible to us. How can we connect with each other when we’re so close but still imperceivable to each other? When machines do the writing for us, when there seems to be a constant hum of environmental, humanitarian, social, and political crises intruding our thoughts, lives, and media, how can we connect and build community to deal with these intrusions? This collection of poetry is exactly this—intrusive thoughts, intrusive media, intrusive nations and people, because Hutchinson is “[...] talking irrational urges — not inside / the tangible world, [...] / but within these hot flickers of icy hate.”

These intrusions, these “irrational urges,” seep into the language of these poems. Disjunctive, shifting like video shorts that show the destruction of a city to a cat video with the single swipe of a finger, Hutchinson shifts image and idea with the swipe of a line or stanza, like when Hutchinson says, “elderly, childish, / and lazy” putting the adjective “lazy” beside “elderly” and “childish” is a fun little candy to suck on. This quote, here, is from the long poem in the second part of the book, “This is Not a Poem.” Taking up the entire second section, this poem has two things that stand out: one, this symbol that breaks up sections of the serial poem:

 

and two, how each section functions almost as a standalone poem. This section, to me, feels like the book is catching signals—disparate, constantly cutting off—but something can be pieced together. I want to decode and stabilize the meaning of these poems that the broadcasting signal on the page is trying to send, but it often comes out as “egregious, irrefutable / error.” This is because “this is not a poem / yet. Poems don’t exist / until we close the book / and walk (or fly) / away.” I agree; in order for poetry to connect people, we need to put the book down and soar into each other, and for the poem to become greater than the book, for it to find a source of lift.

Yet, we are so often glued down to the “virtual edges” of our phone screens. The intrusive foot kicks us, algorithmically feeding us literally everything, from “a heartless archer / shooting billionaires up / into target-less space” or “lithium wars, pandemics, and unexpected roaming fees,” the question then becomes, to Hutchinson, how we can really, deeply connect with each other in order to organize against the growing barrage of crises, and how to love, especially “when the signal’s lost / when we know ourselves again / as strangers—” Can language do the connecting? Maybe poetry? Hutchinson doesn’t believe this, I don’t think, not unless we become “free of Earth’s surly grammars,” and because we are trapped in ”your geography, cosmology, religion, and dead / semantic weight.”

This requires more nuance though, because in my eyes, Hutchinson does think that language can do this connecting: “like the word love that lives / in clover,” but the issue is that people take phrases, refrains, (think about the children!) and they misconstrue them, forcing apart people who need to connect. In the poem “According to the Art of Hunger,” Hutchinson uses an epigraph of Rich, who says that “art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner-table of power which holds it hostage.” Indeed, what these poems in the book are doing, I think, is questioning how the quick-hit dopamine producing algorithm of the internet reproduces new and old forms of hatred; how it's “pretending to be meek-eyed, easy going, detached / from history,” but is actually held hostage by power, by the “good little colonialists” who control the land, the news, the social forums we engage in, and how this is constantly intruding into our lives: “so, as the village floods with breath / soft as bed sheets warmed from sleep, be sure to choose / a more modern idiom.”

Hutchinson, in Lost Signal, explores what it’s like to “flit like a sparrow / between cable news channels while / scrolling on the endless runway of [our] phones, playing dice / with [our] mind’s attention;” what it’s like to be bombarded, intruded on, by news, crises, while being so distracted by all of it, as in the epigraph of Stein in the first section of the book: “everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” In these poems, Hutchinson manages to capture this distracted, intruded mind through quick changing, disjunctive lines, all filled with the constant surprise that the algorithms thrive on. Attuned to, yet slightly cynical toward, the power that language has to connect people, Hutchinson questions and explores how history, language, and the internet can bring people together to fight and resist against the literal bombardment of cities, the collapse of the environment, the power that poetry has in these moments, yet also questions how this very internet also divides, causes us to forget history and the power of language, how it causes us to “follow our bliss / into hell.”

          

 

 

 

Alex Deng is a Chinese-Canadian writer who lives in Toronto. He has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Frozen Sea Poetry, is forthcoming in Genrepunk Magazine, and is the author of the chapbook Fuzzy Trace (solipCYST press). He has an M.A in English from Trent University.

 

Jason Heroux : Thumb-Wrestling With Noah Berlatsky’s Gnarly Sonnets

Gnarly Thumbs, Noah Berlatsky
Anxiety Press, 2025

 

 

 

1

Human thumbs. According to EarthDate episode 387, “our opposable thumbs may have made early human technology and sophisticated cultural practices possible.”  And yet, according to Oxford Languages, the term “all thumbs” means to “be clumsy or awkward in one’s actions.” So true. Many of the modern world’s most sophisticated cultural practices often feel clumsy and awkward in spirit.

 

2

The title of Noah Berlatsky’s poetry collection Gnarly Thumbs is lifted from the final line in the poem “You’ve Got To Stand For Something,” the penultimate poem in the book. “Ditch those rigid traits, and let the / gnarly thumbs / beat down the investors in the Danger Room of your / soul.” I asked a Magic 8 ball what the title signifies and it responded: “Ask again later.”

 

3

I asked Noah Berlatsky why he chose that title. “The book's to some extent an exercise in magpie collage and losing the connections between inundating gibberish, so it's maybe appropriate that those two words have flailed into twisted and stunted stumbling. Which is to say I can't remember!”

 

4

A sonnet is “a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme.” It traditionally has a volta, or “turn,” which signifies a shift or change in direction. Berlatsky’s sonnets are full of hairpin turns, the reader spun in circles. Rollercoaster poetry. Before going on this high-speed ride, please secure all loose items. You may also want something in your stomach to keep it settled.

 

5

My first impression of this book was one of confusion and wonder and, even now, with every re-reading my confusion and wonder continues to grow. I composed the following book blurb to celebrate the experience: “Have you ever entered a dark room and turned on the light and saw dozens of things scurry around in every direction? Our world is that room, this book is that light, and these poems are those things. Noah Berlatsky’s sonnets are quick, hungry, obscene, frightening, and alive. “Paint prosperity. Photograph the opposite. This is Art / Garfunkel on the bridge over heaven’s stentorian schmaltz.” You may feel shaken or disturbed along the way, but rest assured: you’re in good hands with Gnarly Thumbs.”

 

6

When thinking of Gnarly Thumbs I’m reminded of a section from Mark Yakich’s A Guide for the Perplexed. “A poem can feel like a locked safe in which the combination is hidden inside. In other words, it’s okay if you don’t understand a poem. Sometimes it takes dozens of readings to come to the slightest understanding. And sometimes understanding never comes. It’s the same with being alive: Wonder and confusion mostly prevail.”

 

7 

In the book’s acknowledgments Berlatsky thanked Clark Coolidge for giving him the “general idea.” I asked the Magic 8 ball if it could illuminate this general idea, and it stated: “My sources say no.” I asked Berlatsky the same question and he responded, “It's really just the idea of writing nonsense sonnets; I read his book 88 Sonnets and thought, "I could do that!" There are also a couple of direct lifts (I think he mentions borax for example, and I stole that for one title.)”

 

8

Then I asked Berlatsky what was the hardest part about writing Gnarly Thumbs? “The hardest part was actually after it was done and a press (not Anxiety) expressed interest. I was super excited since I hadn't thought anyone would print it, and the editor seemed enthusiastic. Then I got the proofs, and they had taken out words and lines without checking with me. Apparently he felt that the lines were too long (?!) and that readers would be confused (?!) so he basically rewrote them. In some cases, they weren't even sonnets anymore I objected and we went back and forth and eventually he killed the project because I wanted the poems the way I wanted them. It was very distressing and upsetting. But then Cody at Anxiety said he loved it just the way it was, and now it is in the world, and I am glad I refused to settle!”

 

9

Finally, I asked Magic 8 Ball what does Berlatsky hope readers will take away from this book? It responded, “Better not tell you now…”

  

10

 …. but then Berlatsky himself replied, “I hope people laugh? The book is about how I feel sometimes overwhelmed with jargon and earnest effusions and the way that we're all constantly bombarded with marketing copy and demands and word slurry. I find that alienating and enraging and also amusing and exhilarating and weird. So I hope people will share my experience of being bashed about by language and bashing back.”

 

 

 

 

Jason Heroux lives in Kingston, Ontario, and was the Poet Laureate for the City of Kingston from 2019 to 2022. His most recent publications include Like a Trophy from the Sun (Guernica Editions, 2024) and My Life as a Notebook (above/ground press, 2025).

 

Laura Kerr : The Enduring Idea: Art and Poetry in the Age of Endless Circulation

 

 

 

 

A growing strand of contemporary practice, both in art and in poetry, has undergone a fundamental transformation in how it exists and persists. The traditional model of creation → completion has, in many cases, given way to something more fluid, recursive, and continuous. The endurance of the idea… its refusal to conclude… is the work itself. Social media provides a stage for this endlessness, allowing the performance to loop…loop…loop indefinitely, though the phenomenon extends far beyond digital platforms.

In this mode, artists and poets are not producing discrete “works” or “poems” so much as sustaining the life of a single idea through repetition // narration // persona. This is not simply about posting content online; it is about maintaining a living concept that can inhabit any context while remaining recognizably itself. The same gesture that flickers through an Instagram story may reappear on a gallery wall, in a reading, a lecture, or a catalog essay… each time recontextualized but unchanged at its core. Every venue becomes another stage for the same ongoing performance.

the poem reposts itself

until it is no longer a poem

just a gesture enduring / again / again

As a result, traditional hierarchies collapse: digital + physical :: ephemeral + permanent :: popular + institutional. A gallery does not legitimize what began online; a printed book does not finalize what first circulated as a caption or fragment. Each context simply offers another surface for the same enduring idea. The work becomes platform-agnostic, moving fluidly across spaces while the central performance of sustaining the idea continues… uninterrupted … interrupted … uninterrupted.

Most readers will recognize this mode from their own encounters with contemporary practice, the poet whose fragments migrate from Twitter/Instagram to chapbook to reading, the artist whose gesture appears equally at home in a story highlight and a museum label. This shift brings both liberation && constraint. Some poets and artists bypass institutional gatekeeping and maintain direct relationships with audiences, letting ideas evolve organically across contexts. There is something democratizing about work that does not require validation to exist and circulate.

Yet…

the pressure toward endless productivity / self-performance / visibility … risks exhaustion.

Risks repetition.

Risks sacrificing depth … for circulation.

Whether this transformation serves genuine artistic inquiry or merely adapts creative practice to the demands of attention economies remains unclear. We are still too close to the phenomenon to assess its long-term effects on the quality and durability of cultural work. What is certain is that a generation of artists and poets has internalized this logic of endless circulation, and their work—whatever its ultimate value—cannot be understood apart from it. The implications may only become visible in retrospect, when we can see which ideas proved worth sustaining and which were merely sustained.

The crucial question isn’t whether this transformation is good or bad, but whether it serves the art or merely the demands of constant circulation. When endlessness feels intentional—when the refusal to conclude emerges from genuine artistic vision rather than algorithmic pressure—it opens new possibilities for what art can be and do. When it becomes compulsive, art risks becoming indistinguishable from content.

What emerges is a new kind of practice: less about creating discrete objects for specific contexts and more about maintaining a living idea that can manifest anywhere. The artist becomes curator of their own concept, feeding it, adapting it, keeping it breathing across platforms and institutions. In this model, the boundary between creator and creation dissolves… and the art becomes inseparable from the performance of its own persistence—reposted, repeated, sustained.

Art does not end; it only persists, again and again.

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.