Kim Fahner : Staff Picks for Invertebrates, by Zoe Dickinson

Staff Picks for Invertebrates, Zoe Dickinson
Guernica, 2025

 

 

 

Anyone who’s loved a bookstore (and had secret dreams of being locked inside one overnight) will love Zoe Dickinson’s debut collection, Staff Picks for Invertebrates. In so many ways, Dickinson, who works as Manager at Russell Books—and who was previously the Artistic Director of the nationally revered Victoria poetry reading series Planet Earth Poetry—has presented the bookstore as a character, or perhaps as a vortex that invites the reader to better consider the magic of what books and ideas do, and how much humans need them in their lives.

In the quirky poem, “the dream,” the speaker writes of opening “a bookstore/on a moving train” that hurtles “over mountain passes” while they sell copies of Emily Dickinson’s work. In the same delightful piece, “Miss Marple asks for Fifty Shades of Grey” while “the train moves/through moonlight/and purple shadows slided straight-edged/by lodgepole pines.” The dream ends poorly, sadly, with: “a line [that] starts at the register/as we slip/off the tracks/and barrel down/into the Pacific” while the speaker “ding[s] the bell/for help.”

In another imaginative piece, “trees whisper,” Dickinson writes of the ways the bookstore comes to life in the middle of the night. Stories become trees that “whisper in English/at night, after closing.” Magically, every shelf becomes “a branch/each book a leaf/on the tree it once was,” so that “every few nights at 4am/Tolstoy leaps off the shelf” and triggers the store’s alarm. The bookseller’s first job upon opening the store, then, is to “rescue books fallen face-down/autumn leaves, placed back on stems.”

Dickinson pulls the external world into the setting of the bookstore near the end of the poem, considering which used books should be pruned out of the collection, but quickly realizes that “we won’t bear to part with any of it/will simply respread like mulch/into other sections.” Outside the shop, as it’s described in the final stanza, “a sudden hailstorm pelts: we bring/the sidewalk display inside, worry/about the cherry trees/foolishly blooming/too soon.” While she roots the poetry in Staff Picks for Invertebrates in Russell Books, Dickinson moves between that world and the world of her home and the places where she walks her dog, near the ocean. 

This book shifts between the natural world and the contrived, human world that has been pressed down onto it. In so many poems in Staff Picks for Invertebrates, the poet leans down to closely observe what the natural world offers. For instance, a poem like “starfish” has the poet addressing the starfish as “beloved,” and has her mourning the starfish’s “raspberry collapse.” She continues: “you were not a star/nor a fish//you/ancient miracle of hydraulics,//collection/of conscious currents,//linchpin, zipper.” In “laminaria,” the poet writes of the “sea-to-sky bridge/called kelp/mermaid’s bladder,” describing how its “bubble-heads bob, imitate otters” and how a storm can tear up the kelp and how, even despite that, “each mummified cortex/will never forget/how it felt to be green.” In the small description of the flora that lives in the ocean, and along its shoreline, Dickinson draws the reader’s attention to the notion that these are places, filled with living and dead creatures, that have been there for a very long time. In doing so, she also leaves the reader thinking that they ought not to disregard the importance of the creatures that live in the world that existed before humans arrived.

So much of good poetry is about close observation and this is clear in Dickinson’s sharp work. Throughout the collection, there is a series of thirteen short poems that come under the umbrella of the title “commute,” with the poet observing, and writing about, what she sees on the way to work, and then, on her return commute on the way home. These are quiet gems that beg to be noticed.

In “commute I, mourning obeisance,” the poet describes the people on the bus, all of them nodding slightly between wake and sleep, “coffee mugs clutched in laps/like monks’ wooden bowls.” In “commute vii, dawn,” the poet writes—as if etching into glass—that dawn’s sunrise is something that is “nesting in the shaggy pine trees:/yellow.” Continuing, in “commute x, breakfast,” there is the figure of a male commuter, “suit-jacket off,” leaning “into a ravine of scrub” as he “misses the bus/reaching for blackberries.” And, in the final commute poem, “cubicle,” an observation of what’s left of a workplace: “parked between a cube van/and an SUV://one dusty office chair.” Dickinson, in these poems that ribbon themselves through the collection, invites the reader to consider the (seemingly) smallest imagistic vignettes as they pass through their day-to-day routine. What do we miss seeing, she seems to pose the question, while we rush about—back and forth, so often without pausing—during our workdays?

The bookstore poems are bright and reveal the complexity of human behaviour. There is a  poem that mentions shoplifters, and one that speaks of night dreams of a quirky character who searches out Gibran’s The Prophet, and one that depicts a little boy on the escalator that moves between floors at Russell Books, and one that features an old man “who hesitates near the checkout line/his white beard yellowing/like the pages of a 70s paperback.” And, in “Wish You Were Here,” there is “a postcard forgotten/between the pages/of The Haunted Bookshop”  that points to the life of a person the reader does not know. The bookstore itself becomes a brilliant microcosm of the larger world, and of the ways in which we choose to interact with one another as we move through our days. We are, Dickinson seems to be saying, all characters in the stories of our various, respective lives, and we are all interrelated whether we believe we are or not. In the days of encroaching AI, this collection speaks of humanness and vulnerability, of fears that need to be faced, and of the hope that is present everywhere if one looks closely enough to see it.

Staff Picks for Invertebrates is, to be honest, a magical doorway into an alternate dimension that begs us to remember our collective humanity and need for connectivity. In this book, “the bookstore has roots/with mycelial networks/as complex/and responsive/as neurons in the brain,” and “an idea that niggles/won’t be brushed away.” It’s also a place where a customer kisses the cover of a book while the speaker quotes T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” What’s here is a gathering of poems that are bright, complex, and alive in the way they make the reader long to be locked in a bookstore for a single night, just to re-adjust the way in which they view the world around them. What Dickinson does, in this debut collection, is open the door to possibility and hope, reminding us that curiosity, ideas, and the act of reading can have healing properties beyond the concrete walls of any human-made building—reaching out into the world beyond the spaces of our homes, or where we work each day, or even into the places where we regularly walk our dogs at the beginnings and ends of our days.

 

 

 

 

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.

Process Note #80 : José Filipe Alvergue

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by José Felipe Alvergue are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thank you for reading.

 

 

I call en el norte / soy del sur, published 2026 by Omnidawn, a “postnational postmemory in four sonnets” because the book touches on the mnemonic roots of diaspora and traces where they have left marks across borders. I chose the American sonnet for its loose adherence to a formal constraint, and for the turn through which a sonnet promises a sort of illumination out of complexity. But I wanted the turn, instead of a discreet moment of legibility per se, to broaden in its magnitude. To turn is to essai, to attempt, to reach out in language. The four essays of “trust,” “fear,” “anxiety,” and “miracles” are exercises within which the writing tests attachments to what can be felt, against environments and their sensible architectures. The four essays test what can remembered against what is experienced in real time. But because the postnational, diasporic subject is constantly leveraging their story in our attention economy, I wanted to broaden vision while preserving some privacy to the identities emerging from the writing. So, I write to photographs––my family’s personal archive––but let the photos remain illegible. Let them look, indirectly, out from the page. I want the turn to demonstrate the postnational as an emotional landscape, a mapped territory, and then turn its dimension––open the poetics to a territory, map the territory, turn, open.

“Sonnet” translates into “little song,” but more archaically also “little sound,” which I think of as being more material, like the small and persistent contours of mnemonic bits. Tito Rodriguez’s “Los Marcianos” plays out repeating snippets, los marcianos llegaron ya/ y llegaron bailando ricacha…” The song repeats, breaks, and repeats over the sonnets like sea spray. The Immigration Act, the “Alien and Sedition” Act, bits and soundbites rattle across the page and fall into shape, Tom Brokow proposing people don’t want “brown grandbabies,” oral archives of Kumeyaay remembering how they once walked across land now marked and divided. These form the border. Literally, they form vertical lines and stanzas staked into the page to give dimension to a horizon. A foreground, a background, and a timeline. The page becomes a script for reading the form of a place, like the Border. The Border is the place of my youth and adolescence, of the years where my nervous system felt most unsettled as a proportion of curiosity. I would come to resolve this energy through investigation. I reflect on this now, giving unrooted emotions a place to take hold. My practice of investigative, docupoetics feeds the roots with an archival mulch. Facts and truths give off sunlight. Seed, root, and bloom, these are where “little sounds” open undisclosed memories of potential traumas to sight. The archival evidence from a process of searching is meant move nerves away from the inflammatory place of my brain and into the logical, rational hallways of nerves and electricity.

 

My projects often revolve around a central question or etymology, and in this book I am interested in giving shape to trauma, particularly the traumas of diasporic experience. Where and how they originate in a geopolitical dimension, how they are passed down, how they emerge in supposedly new environments, and how they are unmasked through process to reveal themselves. Investigation, or research, is a practice of grounding in the face of an uncertainty so profound as to trigger a nervous response. The response fascinates me. An unresolved love can be traumatic. An overwhelming memory that recurs and repeats traumatizes. The smile captured across someone’s face in a photo engorges my vagal pathways with pure excitement. Unnamed, it is stressful. It takes a toll on the tissue, no matter any legible intention.

 

My engagement with the sonnet exercises this process, as intervals of inflammation and archive, raw feeling and terminology, tender tissue and footnotes. Image, feeling, turn––place, song, turn––face, sound, turn. Moment, inflammation, turn. History, inflammation, turn. Future… And so on. This critical investigation in poetic shape is meant to free us, as diasporic people, from the bondage of inherited pain, and disclose instead the evidence that our environments are strands of a rope called colonialism. And in it, we have still loved.

 

The attempt is also a challenge. It’s work. It’s almost impossible to think about my process without engaging with my process. It’s almost impossible to reflect on a book that is essentially a love letter to my family, and a letter to the small speechless child who looks out from environments I busy myself making sense of, now, without feeling a new inflammation and epidemiological tax over the death of Kohen Wiley, over photos of unaccompanied children sitting in deportation hearings wearing giant headphones like futurist torture crowns.

The diasporic holding environment is, at its most nourishing, loud and exciting, full of stories and characters, unbelievable realities, and fantastical histories. At its most precarious, this environment is quiet and solipsistic, melancholic, and perhaps hyper focused on ghosts. Living in el norte, my experience is that these ghosts are very real and authorized to be violent. En el norte / soy del sur is a love letter to the community hunted by these monsters. It’s a letter to my family, resilient and unrelenting in its ability to conjure love. Love is a turn that reveals magnitude. This book is a love letter to an experience with life we risk losing the more this current historical agenda succeeds in glorifying how easily we can be erased, and how great it is for a few to own the right to be alive.

 

 

 

José Felipe Alvergue is the author of five books, most recently purplish: poetry anger publics (2025), an auto-theoretical reflection on politics and the record of human emotions archived in poetry, and en el norte/soy del sur (2026), a collection of sonnet essays reflecting on diaspora and wellbeing. José grew up on the Mexico-US border in South San Diego, and is a proud member of the Salvadoran diaspora.

link: jfalvergue.com
e-commerce: 
https://www.omnidawn.com/product/en-el-norte-soy-del-surjose-felipe-alvergue/
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/E/bo265673701.html

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

 

Jérôme Melançon : Du feu autour de l’oeil, by Hyam Yared

Du feu autour de l’oeil, Hyam Yared
Mémoire d’encrier, 2025

 

 

 

Hyam Yared’s fifth poetry collection, Du feu autour de l’oeil (Fire around the eye) follows volumes, including novels, notably published in Beyrouth, Paris, and Montreal. It is published here by Mémoire d’encrier along with the previous collection to which it replies, Blessures de l’eau (Wounds of water). The book is at now stands, then, collects two collections, joining two inseparable but distant moments. Its poems ask how to live in conflict, and with conflict; with desire, and the desire for another’s desire.

The collection is philosophical, in the right way, in that it does not allow poetry to yield to argument. Though there is truth in her poems, Yared does not rely on it, does not give in to the Quixotic lack of adherence to reality and its consequences: “Truth is a thorn with which we vainquish / ghosts / in windmills” (La vérité est une épine avec laquelle on vainc des / fantômes / dans des moulins à vent, 64). Rather, she works at renewing meaning by going to its source, beyond its source. Here, that source is experience, and Yared feels for meaning with an “Odyssey of hands / that go further than the water” (Odyssée de mains / qui vont plus loin que l’eau, 123).

This holding back of argument-making and position-taking serves the poems especially since they confront a world that has ended, as the speaker looks to return to its origin. This looking back, this undoing of time, comes at a cost: being expulsed from time, backward, to its beginning, its primordial chaos, the chaos that precedes war and destruction. “Time does not exist for the poem,” Yared writes in the prologue. She pulls her poems from the past, from her own past poems and from what is forever separated from the present, pulls them beyond time as she turns experience inside out, inverts it.

There she can better show the lining of this experience: the body in love, the loving body, the body that lacks and desires, the body that lacks and feels the pain of disappointment, the body whose love is turned inside out to the point where it becomes war.

Thus the collection contains a running opposition between war and love – Yared having moved through both, notably in Lebanon. The author moves through life and sex, follows the passage of one person into another (and of a woman inside a man as well), uses a variety of sexual metaphors, all the while ensuring she differentiates loving sex from rape, sexual forwardness from sexual violence, loving domination from simple human domination. She does note their proximity and the contextual nature of their distinction: sex and life or violence are not directly opposed, there are no contradictions, anything can stand on anything else’s side, can be violated in analogous manners, can become what negates it.

Likewise, she plays on and against the duality of land and sky, oil and cloud, the sand of the sea and the sand of the dry soil. When of destruction she writes, “there are no destroyed cities / but rather cities cut off from their shores” (il n’y a pas de villes détruites / mais des cités coupées de leurs rivages, 60), we see to what great extent life can recede rather than be destroyed, become withdrawal rather than death. These proximal oppositions take on their full poetic strength as we move through the collection, jump backwards and forwards, find them on the same page or on opposite sides of the book, on opposite sides of time.

Such oppositions may be necessary when worlds are destroyed and lives ended, so that we can feel something like boundaries for moments and connections. Yet they are not sufficient, and Yared often pauses to consider method. She takes stock of the infinity of her task – “Nothing is more arduous in a sentence than what the motion / keeps from language” (Rien n’est plus ardu dans une phrase que ce que le geste / dérobe au langage, 28). She also is quite aware of its destructive potential: “Words are jails after which we are running. / With which we kill” (Les mots sont des prisons après lesquelles on court. / Avec lesquelles on tue, 48).

Even as the poems can be light in tone, they contain an infinite violence. The more time we spend with some of its lines, especially in relation with, or in distinction from, seemingly hopeful feelings, the more the inhumanity of war drags us down into its darkness – and with us, life as a whole: “Tell me / how to recognize childhood without that bullet lodged / in this skull, my father’s” (Dis-moi / comment reconnaître l’enfance sans cette balle logée / dans le crâne de mon père, 36).

Taken as a whole, the two collections refuse us any respite longer than a single poem. We are thrown from one image into another, suffer penetrations and lacerations, unions and deflagrations, smotherings and distant embraces, late-life conception of the self, and the becoming-hand of the poet, of the speaker, of anyone who speaks. There is too much to experience, especially in love and war and the love that takes place in spite of war and through it, in war that love cannot interrupt, for arguments and ideas to take us very far. We need each other, and we need poetry:

The sky is never where we expect it. It is reality
that breaks the wings of the seagulls. Before you
I was ambitious for a land without its sky.
Since you, I am ambitious for a sky without its land.
Between the two,
a tongue will do the rest.
Poetry perhaps – this sky
after which a dream chases
strangled with logic. 

Le ciel n’est jamais où on l’attend. C’est la réalité
qui casse les ailes des goélands. Avant toi
j’avais l’ambition du ciel avec la terre en moins.
Entre les deux,
la langue fera le reste.
Peut-être la poésie – ce ciel
après lequel un rêve court
étranglé de logique. (32)

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth chapbook, avoice be heard, is now out with above/ground press, alongside the previous three: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020). His most recent collections are Prairial·es and En d’sous d’la langue, both with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his occasional translations and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Chris Stroffolino : Diary of Small Discontents: New and Selected Poems 1974-2024, by John Yau

Diary of Small Discontents: New and Selected Poems 1974-2024, John Yau
Omnidawn, 2025

I have been a reader of John Yau’s work since the early 1980s when his first ‘new and selected,’ Corpse and Mirror was published, but I’ve only published one essay about him, and that one not on his poetry, but his prose book My Symptoms (1998), so the publication of Dairy of Small Discontents: New and Selected Poems 1974-2024 (Omnidawn, 2025) is a great opportunity to revisit what Anselm Berrigan calls Yau’s “half century-long picture-wild adventure.” Because the range and scope of this work is so encompassing, I have decided to focus more closely on the work written since the publication of his book of poems, Bijoux in the Dark (2018)---the 71 pages of work included in section 6 and 7 of this new 250 page collection.

Section 6 (2021-2023) begins with a 24-line (4 six- line stanzas) piece called “Hearsay Song.” The title certainly complicates what at first may seem the earnest declaration of a heightened sense of mortality and old age that begins each stanza of the poem: “They are dying out and I want to reach them….” Although each stanza begins with this statement, each takes it in different directions. In the second stanza, the attention turns to the first-person singular pronoun: “They are dying out and I want to reach them before they are gone/ just as I want to reach myself before I too am gone.” (179). Given that this poem is followed by five poems that are spoken by an “I,” one of which is called “Confessions of a Recycled Shopping Bag,” (183), a fragmented dramatic monologue which, depending on how it’s read, could raise many ontological questions, one may wonder about Yau’s use of pronouns, and whether speaking as an “I” is always a form of hearsay (if not exactly heresy). Certainly the “I” in the catalogue poem, “On Being Told I Don’t Look and Act Chinese” (180) is as conversant with dissembling as the younger Chinese-American poet Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences, a book which Yau writes approvingly about elsewhere.

Among the first-person dramatic monologues of spurious authenticity here, we also see “The Congressman’s Explanation” and the ‘royal we’ that speaks “The President’s Second Telegram.” Immediately after these pieces comes five pantoums, a form Yau has been adept at for a long time, from the sequence “A Painter’s Thoughts.” These poems, which seem to be made up of lines spoken by an eclectic array of painters whose work Yau, also an art critic, admires, may also serve to comment on the use of the “I” in the preceding poems. For instance, in the first pantoum, we encounter the impersonal ideal of the late artist William Bailey: “I want to paint in a way that the ‘I’ disappears into the sky and trees.” (188)

The “I” can also disappear into fantasies about dead actresses from Hollywood movies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s from Elsa Lancaster to Constance Dowling. In “Hotel Jane Alice Peters,” a piece lined as prose structured around sentences beginning with “I like,” the speaker (not necessarily Yau) imagines meeting Carole Lombard, the third wife of Clark Gable. As the piece develops, the “I like” sentences, which started very simply, become weirder: “I like [hotel designers’] efforts to harness the barely controllable desire we have to step away from the time we inhabit into a hologram sector that has not been overrun by apocalyptic data.” (193) The piece ends with a further twist: “I like knowing that [Carole Lombard] took life as it came, even if I am not of that ilk and do not want to go down that tortuous path.” (194) Similarly, in “A View of the Tropics Covered in Ash,” Yau treats us to such mordant and sardonic sentences as, “There are plenty of tonics guaranteed to cure baldness, but impotency is something to be proud of, since it means your contributions to civilization’s convulsions are dwindling at an accelerated rate.” (195) Knowing that the biographical Yau had had a child, again one must consider this “I” a persona.

Though the word “diary” in the book’s titles implies a singular speaker, Perhaps the speakers in these pieces, or even in individual lines, are all “Small discontents.” In “After I Turned 71 (for Laura Mullen),”  the initial feeling of self-loathing yields to something beyond (“I decide making sense is no longer an acceptable form of lying” (203). In the rhyming couplets of “Chinatown Blues” (204) from the collection Tell It Slant (2023), Yau writes “stop reminding me I have to watch what I say,” which, like many of his lines, has a deeper resonance in challenging the self-consciousness that can stifle improvisation.

Among the lyric pieces and fragments in this book’s final section, consisting of poems from 2024, is “Cento for David Shapiro, “which show some of the ways in which Yau, though often referred to as a second-generation New York School poet, as Shapiro is, is not like Shapiro. Take, for instance, these excerpts in which Yau takes on some literary “sacred cows” in a tone very different from characteristic Shapiro:

       33) Rilke’s letters are often disgusting
       34) Isn’t it wonderful Shakespeare shut up.
       35) Keats’s are the best letters—he wants to know how Shakespeare sat—aren’t we 
              lucky not to know.
       36) Yes, Valéry is an abyss of thought wrecking itself (231)

Although these lines apparently are all quotes from other writers, they remain unattributed here (are they from Shapiro himself?). The “cento” form, however, allows Yau to also include more characteristic Shapiro-like passages such as #60: “Lightly you touch me/ paper on which I write/ Problems have turned into snow at night/ like a little car abandoned in the midst of vague terror.” (233). Since Shapiro died not long before this cento was written/compiled, some lines become especially poignant, such as #82: “Could it be you know I am still living, leashed to the hateful sky.” (235)

I must pause over the word “hate” here. I’ve always been attracted to Yau’s work for the way he doesn’t censor the so-called “negative” dark emotions for the sake of an exemplary transcendent poetic ethos, much less the ostensibly more authentic speaker located in a nuclear family, by contrast Yau gives us:

90) I too hated aspects of my family, that novel, but I used poetry to place that hate in a  secret strong place (237).

Another poem that highlights Peter Gizzi’s claim that “Yau is a supreme formalist” is “A Be Sky,” a complex reworking of an abecedarian. There are also poems that put classical (Tang Dynasty ) Chinese poets in dialogue with Yau’s modern/post-modern New York milieu, such as “Li Shangyin Enters Manhattan” (205) and the pantoum “For Brice Marden (1938-2023) via Han Shan” (238).

 But, perhaps most of all, I return to Yau for a treasure trove of statements and perceptions that stir wonder by being slightly askew, such as “Suppose talking about the movie reminds you kissing is like rolling little migraine pillows around on the floor when no one is looking, and that being in love is like trying to understand a silent movie that no one has ever described accurately.” (240) or this from the title piece, “as information highway becomes increasingly crowded with squatters, the odds of shopping malls squeezed between prison complexes and gated communities multiply like fungi after rain.” (244). A master of both the line and the sentence, Yau, in his recent work, may be as much at the peak of his powers as he was in the 80s, 90s and 00s. I have to agree with Norma Cole who writes “Yu’s speculative koans operate to puzzle conceptual thought. His irresistible Diary of Small Discontents is the enduring conversation that we seek.”

 

 

 

 

Chris Stroffolino has published 9 collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (2025, Blaze Vox); in addition to releasing 4 albums of song, he’s also published a collaboration of music-themed poems with Steve Carll, Dreaming to a Click (2026, Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays (primarily on 21st century poetry) is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, periodicities published his short essays on Virginia Konchan, Rae Armantrout, Johua Beckman and Juliana Spahr. A conversation with Sunnylyn Thibodeaux was recently published by Boog City, one with Adeena Karasick appeared in BlazeVox; and one with Maxine Chernoff is forthcoming. Poems are forthcoming in Hanging Loose and New American Writing. He lives in Oakland, CA. where he taught freshman composition and Creative Writing at Laney College from 2008 until February 2025, when he suffered a stroke.

Sophie Klahr : Maps

 

 

The story of a young man who walked through the world sleeping. People would come at all hours of the night for the young man they called Buddha, hollering his name from the sidewalk. On one side of his place was ours, and on the other, two black hole rowhouses that spat out teenagers then swallowed them up again. A heavy woman with stringy hair and close-set eyes seemed to keep watch over the brood, but it was hard to imagine her mother to them all. In sun or sleet or snow, one scrawny boy with a shadow-mustache walked a grey pit bill mix, and when the dog shit on the bricked sidewalk, the boy ignored it, he and the dog equally ill-kempt, their eyes and mouths drooping like caricatures, boy and dog each always scratching some scabbing scrape or cut. A girl no more than twelve wandered the street on balmy days, wearing a helmet, sometimes riding a bicycle like a lazy fly, asking at houses containing children—could so-&-so come out and play. She lingered on stoops and curbs, sometimes simply standing in the middle of our cramped street, staring at our other neighbors coming and going, standing too close to their parking or leaving cars as if waiting for an invitation. There was a day when, arriving home, I gave her an empty notebook from the back of my car, silently congratulating myself for the impulsive benevolence. What should I do with this, she asked, and I suggested drawing a picture, maybe drawing flowers, it being spring and all. Hours later she rang our doorbell, reciting that her mother had directed her to bring the notebook back. In our rowhouse, my fiancé and I had papered one entire side of a hallway with maps, and when we broke up, I tore them all down, to shreds. Even though I was the one who had broken us. True story.

 

 

 

 

 

Sophie Klahr is the author of Driftwood (Gasher Press, 2027) and a number of other chapbooks & books. Her writing may be found in The New Yorker and elsewhere. sophieklahr.com

Shelagh Rowan-Legg : On Writing Co—Star and Response

 

 

 

 

My parents had a subscription to The Globe & Mail, and as a tween, I would regularly check my horoscope. I’m not sure how much I believed it at the time; perhaps too much, as I tried to convince myself of its veracity and explanation why I was a strange child without many friends; I was a Cancer, and therefore a homebody, like a crab, moving sideways away from people. Except that I wasn’t, and over time, I realized the limitations of such predictions. There are too many factors over which we have no control, too many variables in our lives to think that the alignment of stars and planets at the minute we are born are a template set in stone.

So it took a few glances at the Co—Star app before I paid attention. Yes, it asked for your birthday, location, and time to send its daily words of wisdom and do’s and don’ts. But its odd phrasing and its what felt like more left-field advice was less to do with any adherence to a chart and more to make you think about your life, or a moment in your time, differently. Over the course of several months, I wrote down some of the single-sentences of advice that would pop up on my lock screen, ones that felt like prompts, and wrote a series of poems. Each was phrased as an instruction, or a reminder; a plea, or a compliment. Perhaps that was just my interpretation, so depending on what each would make me think of, the poem would either be in the first or the second person. That second person might be me, or it might be the reader.

Part story, part meditation, part advice column. To myself of the past and the future, to anyone who might take something from it. 

 

 

 

 

Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a writer and filmmaker in Montréal. Her poetry and short stories have been published in numerous journals such as The Windsor Review, The Ampersand Review, and New Poetry. Her chapbook CO—STAR & RESPONSE is newly out from above/ground press. Her short films have screened at festivals around the world, and she is a Contributing Editor at ScreenAnarchy. Find her at shelaghrowanlegg.com and on Bluesky, @shelaghrowanlegg.northsky.social.