A Valley Uncanny in NMCLT: An interview with poet Paul Vermeersch
Paul Vermeersch [photo credit: Bianca Spence] is a poet, multimedia artist, professor, and editor. His eighth collection of poetry, NMLCT, was published in September 2025 by ECW Press. Paul holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He is currently a professor at Sheridan College where he serves as the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.
Paul Vermeersch reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 27, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026. He is also conducting a poetry workshop as part of the festival on Saturday, March 30 [registration required; spaces still available].
Margo LaPierre: NMLCT has been called visionary, high concept, gymnastic, disorienting, and vivid. What weird thing would you compare NMLCT to?
Paul Vermeersch: A cephalopod. I don’t know if I have an explanation for this answer. It’s the first thing I thought of. A cephalopod is complex, deliberate, stealthy, swift, fluctuating, and somehow simultaneously appealing and unsettling. Perhaps this book is, somehow, a cephalopod.
ML: Expand on this line: “Because we did not invent the sun, we have convinced ourselves we cannot trust the light of day.”
PV: I mean it literally. I suppose it could be read as a comment on the hubris that values human achievement over the natural world, and this book certainly explores the increasing divide between those two states of being. For myself, I want to hear a particular voice speaking this line: a voice that champions post-humanist values and is chiding us for clinging to an anthropocentric view of the universe while sarcastically praising us for inventing absurd machines… and for relying on them.
ML: “They kept building the wrong house.” What is the right house?
PV: I have to admit that I don’t really know what the right house is. Not in the poem, anyway. I think the idea is that the right house is unknowable. It didn’t get built. Perhaps it’s not possible to build the right house. It might be so speculative, so hypothetical, that any attempt to build it would be condemned to failure. It might be equally difficult to draw a face accurately from memory as from imagination. I suppose the same can be true for a house. All I know is that the poem doesn’t know for sure, or it doesn’t want you to know.
ML: What is the primary emotion of NMLCT? What about the secondary emotion lurking underneath, the countercurrent?
PV: In this book, I wasn’t attempting to capture any familiar feeling or recreate any known experience. I was attempting to create a new experience, one that hasn’t been felt yet. But, because we only have our “real” experiences as a frame of reference, any new experience can only be compared to what we already know, but it’s never an exact fit, and this creates something like an “uncanny valley” between what we experience and what we expect to experience. So, the primary emotion is that of a wolf that is also a cube. The secondary emotion is that of a forest that has been growing beneath the glaciers of Antarctica for millennia. There are no wolves there, but there are other animals. And birds. What is the emotion of being a cubic wolf, or a lost world inhabited by birds? We cannot know, but we experience it anyway. That.
Margo LaPierre is a freelance book editor and poet. She serves on Arc’s editorial board and wrote the Writers’ Union of Canada’s guidebook on the author-editor relationship. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and a publishing certificate from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her second poetry collection is Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025).
