Founded
in 2000 by Rose and David Scollard, and acquired by Neil Petrunia, and his wife
Terry Davies around 2013. I’ve acted as
senior acquisitions editor there since 2013 and recently added the talents of
John Wall Barger to the editorial team. We’ve focused mainly on poetry and
solely Canadian works since the founding of the press. We look for manuscripts
that say something new, while attending to the craftwork of poetry.
I believe that Canada has its own
literary voice distinct from its foundations as a commonwealth of the British
Empire, and distinct from our America friends. We must. We have different
concerns, values, and culture, distinct from both behemoths that flank us.
Poetry has trends and schools, as do
music, the visual arts, and film. At the moment, as Canada grows into itself,
we are immersed in “voices of identity”. This creates gateways into worlds we
cannot inhabit ourselves, and, hopefully, increases our capacity for
understanding and empathy. It also can underscore our differences and increase
tribalism.
But what I’m most fascinated with is
the existential commonality that exists in our humanness, and our common
capacity for as Blake says in Auguries of Innocence, “the world in a grain of
sand.” And I find myself increasingly drawn to existentialist phenomenology coupled
with surreal metaphor. Poems the speak to common emotion and experience through
description and experience embodying the commonality of humanness filtered
through surprising language and imagery.
One of our authors, Tyler Engstrom, published
his debut collection with us, Think of How Old We Could Get, and I look forward
to more from him. His work is mainly written in prose poem, with short scenes
of high cinematic images and a punch of emotion. His voice is absolutely
unique. I hope to see more from this promising writer in the future. I’d
especially like it if some upcoming filmmaker would make some short films of
his work. Hint, hint, out there. Here’s his poem “Crying Men” from Think of How Old We Could Get (2021)
Crying men
I stuck my hand out the window
and made it a plane in the wind as we approached the gas station,
a pock mark on an otherwise naked body to run rubber on.
I walked in and the station attendant asked me,
“Do you believe in God?”
I told him no, or maybe when the moon seems right
and I need something more fitting to a poem than
believing in nothing.
He took me by the hand and we walked out back into the field
behind the station where I imagined someday wild horses had run free
and he asked me again
and I told him only when the wheat we pass through
becomes bread and wine will I believe the word of God
and he took my hand again and kissed me on the mouth.
We both tasted like cigarettes and I said still, no,
but he cried and I don’t do well with crying men.
He said God told him the next man would be beautiful
and tell him what he needed to know.
I told him I was not a beautiful man.
He said yes, but he hoped I might do
so I laid him down and told him,
“There is a hole in your heart no God can fill.”
I came back to the station and you were waiting there
with a soda in your hand and the tank full
and you said, “Who do we pay?”
“Nobody, we’ve already given so much.”
It started snowing a few minutes later on the road
and you told me my eyes looked like Lake Louise.
Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is the senior acquisitions editor (poetry) at Frontenac House Press. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021) won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB). Her latest appearance introduces Hunger: The Poems of Susan Musgrave (Wilfred Laurier Press. 2025).
