Manahil Bandukwala : Introduction
Conyer Clayton : Failing to find a line by Robert Creeley in a book by Frank Stanford
Ellen Chang-Richardson : ghazal for shifting perspective
Grace : Ode to My Cat
Misha Solomon : Puppy Sounds
Dani Spinosa : Iphigenia
Jade Wallace : All night I stare at the TV screen—
Sanna Wani : Drafting
When rob asked me if working for a publisher gave me a different outlook on poetry and poets, I was in the thick of acquisitions, and all I could think about was how much books can change from the initial manuscript to the published version the public sees. There are so many edits, revisions, versions, and cuts—especially cuts. Poems we hold dear don’t end up making the final cut.
When I finalized edits for Heliotropia, I had a folder of poems that didn’t quite fit the direction the book took, or poems that repeated themes that didn’t need repeating. When my book came out, I was too busy touring to send these solo poems off to magazines. When the promotional dust settled, it was too late, and I felt too disconnected from the poems and from the process of submitting to magazines to reach into that folder.
For this folio, I reached out to poets with recent or soon forthcoming poetry collections. I asked them for a poem that, for whatever reason, was part of an early version of their book, but isn’t in the version we buy and read. I didn’t ask why these poems were cut, but I will say that the reason isn’t that the poem itself isn’t good enough. I hope this folio gives a peek at the many-layered process of putting together a poetry manuscript, and makes you curious enough to check out the fantastic books of the poets featured.
Manahil Bandukwala
is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024; shortlisted for the Pat
Lowther Award, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Ottawa Book Award, and winner
of the Archibald Lampman Award) and MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022).
She was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her
work at manahilbandukwala.com.
after Shaya Ishaq’s Library of Infinities (2021)
i pulse in and out of myself, bathed in
sun
light crafted by your building hands
cessation, elevation, curve me and i
curl
my soul, looks back: we are one
– holding hands
slippin’ light like children by frames
of green
black, blue, maroon, books clasped – grasping
hands
embraced by the greats, voices strong,
shadow
now illuminated by their gifting hands
rebuilding anew, reactivating truth, we
are
one chorus rising
– guiding hands.
“ghazal for shifting perspective” does not appear in Through the Eyes of Another (Buckrider Books, 2027).
Ellen Chang-Richardson [Nicolai P Gregory] is an award-winning poet, hybrid genre writer, and editor. Their debut collection of poetry, Blood Belies, was shortlisted for the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Their second collection of poetry, Through the Eyes of Another, is forthcoming Spring 2027. They write to shine a light. www.ehjchang.com
My five-pound puppy is fast asleep on my scratched-up hardwood floors. He’s on his side, his four stubby legs pointing straight away from his gently snoring body. I pick him up and his eyes briefly open, glassy and unresponsive like the whole fish my grandfather always ordered at Le Jardin du Pékin. I press him to my chest and he’s asleep, again or still, and I can hear him now, making noises that I’ve decided are contentment but could be anything or nothing. He smells overripe, a kiwi left too long in the fruit bowl, and there’s poultry-flavoured toothpaste stuck to the fur above his eye. That fur is soft, so soft, softer than any dog I’ve ever touched. I don’t know why he’s here, why we wanted him, why we have him if we don’t need him to hunt or to guide or to pull a sled. I don’t know what I feel for him, toward him, about him, but I know it isn’t love. I know I like the sounds he makes, the purrs and sighs and burbles. I know I like his warmth against my chest.
little black dog
is there a purpose to be served
by serving no purpose
“Puppy Sounds” does not appear in My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Brick Books, 2026).
Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has appeared in journals across Canada and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, 2026, and 2027 (Biblioasis) and in On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House). He is a student in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. He is the author of three chapbooks, and his full-length debut, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, was released by Brick Books in March 2026.
I am
drying my tears on the dish rack.
With soap
and steel, I am weeping again
with my
hands, asking why.
No one
makes room for life except the sky,
Who is
always widening. My therapist says,
Your
feelings are clouds
and I take her too seriously.
I think I
am always blue. The hollow sun
Is my best
friend. The moon, an ex-lover.
I am a
different colour than I think I am.
This is
it. The dishes are done.
The
lasagna is almost ready. Everything is dry,
Or dry
enough. I have room in my hands again
For a new poem.
“Drafting” was first published in Contemporary Verse 2 and does not appear in Lantern (House of Anansi Press, 2026).
Sanna Wani [Hamzah Amin] is the author of Lantern (House of Anansi Press, 2026). She has a dog named Juniper.
all
night I stare at death.
Pressing
my ear to the locked
door
that she is, I hear the crystal
vial
splinter of temporal bone.
One
clear crack and her mind
whelms
the room in a cologne of
wormwood
and lavender.
Notes
seep across the threshold
to
find me kneeling in the hotel hall
among
some thousand thwarted
witnesses
to her life, who pass
through
this corridor each day,
waiting
for the sonic boom that
recurs
with the circling of the earth.
After
the gunshot, she is a vignette
for
fourteen minutes before the living
rush
in to bear her unrecognizable
body
away. They come with their rubber
gloves,
turn up with their scrub brushes
and
lye. They tear out the blood-spotted
carpet,
trash the mattress and duvet.
They
cannot take her from this room;
its
contents have been resignified.
The
number on the door is now
shorthand
for her quondam name.
She
need not respond when echoes from
a
farther room dismiss her, felo de se—their
own
hearsay forfends this easy resolve.
Outside,
we overlingerers whisper among
ourselves,
amateur attorneys defending
our
silk-stockinged pseudo-suicide in her
blue-nosed
leather heels. For instance,
some
argue that she would never wilfully
collapse
as she did, haphazard,
on
a corner of the bed.
Regardless,
the scant light that transfuses
the
drawn curtains of her face is an
afterimage
I cannot close my
eyes
against. Overcome, I cling to
my
chosen rumours, my stray
inklings,
the fiction that
she
can still be solved.
Our
own illuminous endings
are
tantamount to hers:
Death
will be the moment
that
we become unknowable.
See?
I understand this.
So
I cannot accept that she
is
gone to the myriad,
another latent enigma.
“All night I stare at the TV screen—” does not appear in The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2026).
Jade Wallace [photo credit: Mark Laliberte] is a queer and chronically ill poet, novelist, and literary critic. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues internationally, including Best Canadian Poetry, Channel, Geist, Salamander, Seventh Wave, and The Malahat Review. Wallace is the author of two poetry collections, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There and The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2023 and October 2026) and a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press, 2024). As co-founder of the writing partnership MA|DE, Wallace has also co-authored two collaborative poetry collections, ZZOO and Detourism (Palimpsest Press, 2025 and 2028). Keep in touch: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca
He had a heart I wish I had.
—Robert
Creeley
I guess I placed two white
orchid flowers between
these pages but I forget
when. They didn’t exist
until today when they
crumbled onto my lap.
“Failing to find a line by Robert Creeley in a book by Frank Stanford” does not appear in the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, 2026).
Conyer Clayton [photo credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey] is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, a dual US-Canadian citizen living between Ottawa and Kentucky. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks. Conyer’s novel-in-progress has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, a McCormack Writing Centre Scholarship, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and The City of Ottawa. the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn) is their third book.
Look,
if you stand at
the top of the stairs
that lead up to the bedrooms
and look straight down
it’s a two-story drop
to the basement floor.
The railing seems barely enough.
I fell once,
sneaking down for a drink of water,
just a few stairs, enough for a bit of a bruise.
Not bad.
We all fell down
those stairs,
one way or another.
Mom’s high heels and shows for rows of rapt teddy bears.
And, of course,
that one fall
we have all heard the story of:
Dad reaching out
to grab her arm faster than
that one time he swam out to get the inflatable taken by
those rare Wasaga waves,
and then the shoulder dislocating.
We found the
sling once,
stuffed in a box in the old bedroom closet,
remember?
Now yellowed and greyed and bloodied.
I thought it looked like the Shroud of Turin.
And all this
time
the railing was there,
the basement floor below,
and Mom
standing at the top.
“Iphigenia” does not appear in Whispering Gallery (Assembly Press, 2026).
Dani Spinosa is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a computer programmer. She is sometimes an adjunct professor, a software developer, a digital and creative project manager, a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, President of Canthius, the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and a member of the editorial collective for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 5. She is the author of two books of poetry: Whispering Gallery (Assembly Press, 2026) and OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and one scholarly book: Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks of poetry and several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry and technology. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario with one beautiful man, two lovely cats, and one very silly dog.
It’s true what they say about black
cats:
It’s hard to take a good photo of you.
Your fur, a blurry shadow in every shot
The hallowed night I hold in my hands.
Now I know the secret,
how to find that sacred light.
When I’m shrouded by the dark
I just look for your green eyes.
Whoever said cleanliness is next to
godliness
was surely thinking of your forebears.
Oh, to be loved by a small god
who demands no prayer
a killer who cares to keep me
alive, by sitting on my chest
while I sleep. It’s to make sure
I’m breathing, I know. Just another job
between shifts at the biscuit factory,
kneading tirelessly into my soft
middle.
Tiny masseuse, sweet baker
make something nourishing
of me. Fill our home with that cosmic
gift
of healing, the music of you
meowing trilling yowling purring
my tissues and bones whole, between
naps.
What fortune, what luck to be chosen
by the perfect black cat.
“Ode to My Cat” does not appear in Be Water (Anvil Press, 2026).
Grace is a queer Hong Kong-born settler living on the traditional and Treaty territory of the Anishinabek people. Her sophomore collection, Be Water, is published by Anvil Press. Her debut poetry collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak, is a Lambda Award finalist and her work can be found in ROOM, carte blanche, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her online @thrillandgrace.
Claudia Lapp (1946-2026)
Honey, and horses,
and bright days
rich in sunflowers.
The ecstatic
joys of youth.
Where do we go now,
no longer earthbound?
Out into the universe?
All of my realizations
always come slow.
But I’ll see you now:
in the twinkling of stars,
in undefinable moments,
in the half-mad river of crazy dreams.
Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a PhD in Canadian Literature at McGill University. Norris became a Canadian citizen in 1985. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, Where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.
