Vera Hadzic is a writer based on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, Ontario. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by Proper Tales Press in 2023. She has an Honours BA in English and history from the University of Ottawa, and an MA in English Literature from Queen’s University. Her first full-length book of poems, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery, was published by Anvil Press in 2025.
Katrina
The
speaker in these poems feels embodied and estranged from themselves at the same
time. How do you construct poetic voice?
Vera
I've
struggled with that a bit. Some of these poems are the first times that I've
actively tried to write about my personal perspective. Almost always the “I” in
my poems is not actually me, or it's maybe a removed version of me, but I never
really like to be interpreted as being the “I” behind the poems. But in this
book there's quite a few [poems] that really are drawing on personal
experiences. So that was kind of fun to do, but I also, of course, still had
the other problems. In one of my creative writing workshops at the University
of Ottawa, I had a poem that we were workshopping and there was no “I” in the
poem at all. If there's no perspective, it’s kind of like a third person type
thing. There's ways to play around with voice in the sense that it doesn't
necessarily need to be tied to a person.
Katrina
Many of your poems are inspired by other art forms. What are you looking for in the artwork? Is it surface level, or are you looking deeper into history, your own response to the art, or is it a collection of these things?
Vera
Often I'll see something or read something and have a certain impression of it, and then I chase that impression and see what comes out of it. Sometimes I can end up really removed from the original context and other times I need to go into the original context in order to pull more out of it. I'll spend a lot of time on the wikipedia page for a painting for example, because often that can give you different angles and everything's in one place. I see an artwork and I sit with it and I start by trying to describe it or trying to see what it's evoking for me. Then I usually get more abstract ideas that I can then pursue. I think actually what it is that I pursue textures or impressions. There's a poem in the book, Still Life with Fish, which was inspired by a painting that I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and I love paintings like that where everything feels so distinct, and like you could touch it and take it out of the painting and hold it. Then from there it kind of connected to other ideas I was thinking about at the time or other things I was ruminating in.
Katrina
When a poem engages directly with other art forms, how much context do you want the reader to have on the artwork itself?
Vera
That’s hard. On the one hand I feel like I have a clear idea of how I'm engaging with the artwork and I want the reader to know what my vision is. But at the same time, I'm really resistant to giving the reader too much context or explanation. I feel like sometimes, especially for my poetry, it'll make it a bit too clear cut and then you lose a lot of the interesting things that happen when you have little pockets that are unclear. So I try to be fairly minimal with context. If people are interested, they can find out [the context] and if they're not, then they don't need to. The poem can always stand on its own.
Sometimes I read a book of poetry where the writer or poet will have really extensive notes at the end, really explaining where everything came from, and I love reading these. You could give a really clear roadmap of where things came from.
Katrina
The body is constantly being constructed and deconstructed, both human and animal. When did you realize the body would be the central terrain of the work?
Vera
I would say really early. I had the title and then I wrote the title poem. This is where it gets into it being a slightly more personal book than my previous work had been because I was just starting to really reckon with the fact that I had a lot of anxiety that was registering in really physical ways. There's this line about keeping things inside yourself and that's genuinely how I was feeling at that time. And I still feel that way. Sometimes I feel like I say too much or I say the wrong thing or I'm paranoid about my bodily functions, like I feel like I can't control my body in terms of expressing myself and also in terms of the literal fluids of my body. It’s a constant worry. A lot of the poems were tackling that and at the same time I was thinking through this idea of the monastery as a space that's enclosed, and how that's both kind of liberating and comforting, but also constricting. It's actually getting really hard to write a poem that doesn't touch on [the body] in some way. It feels like I have this one theme that I'm really exploring right now and everything circles back to it. Actually, even when I'm not working on that theme, I think my poetry just does really gravitate towards descriptions of bodies, both human and animal. My poems always somehow end up there.
Katrina Wilcox is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer whose work explores identity, disconnection, and the deeply human truths found in the strange and the speculative. She writes from the intersections of queerness, cultural identity, and resistance, crafting stories that unsettle while offering connection. She is the co-founder and fiction editor of flo. Literary Magazine, President of VERSe Ottawa and currently serves as a poetry editor for the University of Ottawa’s Common House Magazine. Her work has been previously published in WA Magazine and Lived Magazine.
