Ethan Vilu : Cenizas, by Cynthia Guardado

Cenizas, Cynthia Guardado
University of Arizona Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

In Cenizas, Cynthia Guardado conducts a forceful display of poetry’s ability to bear witness. With subtlety and precision, the book reflects upon the poet’s family history and its deep interconnections with the Salvadoran civil war (in which the government of El Salvador, aided and abetted by the United States, conducted a sustained campaign of murder, torture, rape, and terror against the civilian population). Through its variety of poetic modes and across multiple speakers and languages, Cenizas functions as a kind of non-linear narrative epic, testifying to Guardado and her ancestors’ experience with admirable clarity. Saturated throughout is a particular bittersweet quality, a particular ache -- a steadfast awareness of beauty amidst the onslaught of evil and suffering.

The poems in Cenizas are clearly the product of a sustained, disciplined, and thoroughly patient practice. Indeed, this is borne out by the manuscript having won or contended for awards as early as 2016. Every piece of the book is pared down to its absolute essentials, resulting in a degree of consistency and cohesion which is truly remarkable. Lofty (though assuredly meaningful) abstractions are juxtaposed effectively with concrete imagery -- the speaker’s “layers of memory” and their abuela (grandmother) “frozen in the in-between” sit alongside a beautiful description of a hard-boiled egg: “We eat through the darkness, pause / between bites to trickle chile onto yolks.” (all of this from “Los Estados Is How I Forget”). Moments of great familial joy stand in brutal contrast with abjection and death; in “Diaspora,” the image of a bus ride as family reunion is immediately followed by a bus halted by government militares, a passenger detained and left for dead. Throughout the text, Guardado demonstrates an immense ability to draw out the beauty of the mundane using spare language. Two of my favorite moments in Cenizas consisted of three-line images, simple and yet truly arresting -- “I kneel in front / of your open refrigerator / the day after Christmas.” (from the beginning of “Before We Send My Cousin’s Body Back to El Salvador”) and “This district desolate, / except for the occasional / call of a voice, sits in darkness.” (from “Your Tía Finds You Un Taxi Seguro”). In these images and many others, Guardado captures both the magnificence and the devastation of her subject.

The meticulous quality of Cenizas can also be seen in the structural decisions made by the poet, which above all are characterised by clarity of purpose. At the level of both the language used as well as spacing, punctuation and line placement, each piece is designed to produce a reading experience which is in harmony with the poem’s subject and emotional resonances. In “Ars Poetica,” an opening section exudes a slow, methodical feeling, with entire sentences kept to single lines (“I say, There is so much I want to know. / I feel as if you are the only one with answers.”). In sharp contrast, the poem’s second section abandons punctuation, de-capitalizes the first-person pronoun, and employs anaphora in order to communicate a frantic outpouring of emotion (“i cannot explain to her / how each night i see all of our ghosts / how our ancestors hide in the planes / how they call me back to find the truth”). The entire text is filled with similar instances of intentionality, a fact which greatly contributes to the overall quality of the book.

There is undoubtedly a great stylistic difficulty to writing about trauma and upheaval, and a myriad set of challenges to face when utilising poetry as testament. Guardado surpasses every one of these obstacles with Cenizas, and in so doing has crafted a work of unmitigated beauty and urgency. In the second poem of the text (“The Historian”), the poet tells the reader that “I don’t need to prove to you why we are important.”. While this would be true on its face irrespective of the quality of the work that followed, there is a particular joyous quality in the enjoyment of this masterful book, which for the reader brings the reality of that statement into resplendent self-evidence.

 

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu (she/they) is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Her longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020, and her chapbook Drawings From Before The Red Year is forthcoming with Anstruther Press. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station Magazine. She is still looking for a good used copy of Money Secrets at the Racetrack by Barry Meadow.

Ethan Vilu : Cradle and Spoon, by Kate Spencer

Cradle and Spoon, Kate Spencer
Minor Works of Death Press, 2022

Across all of the intimate and intense terrain that is covered in her debut collection, Kate Spencer consistently displays both profound thoughtfulness and an admirable sense of intention. The first publication from the exciting new press Minor Works of Death, Cradle and Spoon is the product of a rigorous meditation on the nature and capacities of poetry. This is not speculation on my part; in an appended essay, Spencer makes explicit many of the key premises which informed the book’s creation, and grounds her approach concretely within the history of the medium. As both a jaggedly honest display of emotion and an exposition of a particular approach to poetic writing, Cradle and Spoon is a fascinating work, worthy of one’s careful attention.

As a collection of poetry, Spencer’s debut covers many of the most difficult and ineliminable parts of the human experience, including parent-child relationships, substance use, self-expression and repression, love, and mourning. In particular, Spencer asserts her own specifically feminine relation to all of these facets of life, and takes care to articulate the gendered nuances of her experience through the confessional mode. The poet’s focus is turned intently upon the humanity of herself and others; this leads to some admirably wry portrayals of those who would misapprehend another person out of misogyny or general insecurity. In “A Letter to Ted,” one of my favorite poems in the collection, Spencer writes of the late Ted Hughes:

Work to forget a maiden name,

two anniversaries, and the amount
you owe women you’ve made
into ghosts, and ghosts into poetry–

another masterpiece.

Stylistically Spencer’s work is incredibly versatile, containing a variety of free verse approaches as well as madrigals, villanelles, haikus, glosas, and variations on the sonnet form. One frequently encounters startling, remarkable images, often delivered across multiple lines - I could point to “Without sleep, I hear the familiar, low drone of silence / sneak in under the crack of the door, dying to erupt / into the madness of another week.” from “The Winter After Frank’s Death” as an example. Many pieces in the collection are tightly wound with irregular rhymes and sonic play, and a large number employ some form of repetition, whether it be of a single word (e.g. “silver” in “Inheritability”) or a deliberately imperfect repeating of the entire contents of a piece (as in “Sleepwalk Palindrome”). The use of these poetic devices is frequently supremely effective, as in “Thin-skin vanity, my tougher tongue split / tight circles of details–sweat that inherits / all of the living.” from “A New Madrigal for an Old Coven or Beatitudes for the Vain”. I did struggle at times with what seemed like an almost relentless quality in some of the poems - the cascading alliterations and internal rhymes would briefly become overbearing, as in “The ache wakes her again, / reaching for blindness, she / sews new scabs each morning / to skew familial likeness.” from “The Creation Myth (or Postpartum)”. Additionally, the poet’s occasional use of fairly graceless end rhymes divorced from consistent metre (as in “Something Like Grace Kelly” and “Her Loose Dress”) struck me as a pronounced weak point in the text. Although these are mostly minor concerns, I did at times wonder if a given poem’s subject would have been better served by a greater degree of stylistic subtlety.

There were a few moments in Cradle and Spoon which presented me with challenges, but this is entirely commensurate with the level of rigour and attention which Spencer brings to her writing practice. This is a book which interrogates poetry as a medium, and which is committed to exploring the genre’s contours and boundaries; it is not contentious to say that not every instance of such exploration will appear successful to all readers. What cannot be denied is that Cradle and Spoon is a tremendously enjoyable book, and a worthwhile read for anyone who is passionate about poetry. Spencer’s thoroughgoing commitment to the medium, encompassing all of its ambiguities and peculiarities, is a quality to which all of us should aspire. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu (they/she) is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020, and their poems and reviews have been featured in a variety of outlets. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station Magazine. She dearly hopes to one day play the Marine Park golf course in Brooklyn, and she can be found on twitter at @CNNSwitzerland.

Ethan Vilu : Go, by Shelley A. Leedahl

Go, Shelley A. Leedahl
Radiant Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

It is a very difficult task to write honestly about loneliness. Accurately highlighted as “the other contemporary epidemic” on the back cover of Shelley A. Leedahl’s new collection, it is a phenomenon which can permeate the entirety of one’s life, but which can be almost impossible to meaningfully acknowledge. As such, Leedahl’s writing in Go deserves immense credit for speaking directly to her experiences, and for doing so in a way that is thorough, unflinching, alternately wry and earnest, and always generous and artful. It is this commitment to both forthrightness and poetic subtlety which makes Go such an enjoyable book.

Though there are many different narrative moments in Leedahl’s poetry, possessed with a wide variety of emotional tenors, I was perhaps most drawn to the beautiful spare quality of those lines where loneliness was confronted head-on:

Everything is exquisite
but once again, no plans for New Year’s Eve.

Getting to be a long time;
you’d like to hold anyone’s hand.

(from “Late December”)

With no artifice or embellishment, Leedahl captures both the pain of solitude and the complex feelings which can come from articulating that pain. These lines also serve to demonstrate the poet’s gift for strong, emphatic endings; they act as the closing couplets to a haunting poem of observation. I was particularly impressed by this facet of Leedahl’s writing in “Salema,” which ends a section of pieces on travel in Europe, and which has one of the strongest endings to a poem that I’ve encountered in some time. Yet another strength of Leedahl’s poetry lies in her capacity for imaginative, stark images; Go has the distinction of containing two of my new favorite sky-related lines (“Clouds smithereen, like dandelions.” from “Alberta Avenue,” and “The heavens have gone reptile.” from “Sunshine Coast Series”). Leedahl additionally displays a well-developed capacity for sonic playfulness throughout the collection, as in this small section from "Our Therapists Agree”:

stars sprayed like charms,
smoke-tangles and lake sweaters,
loon-songs endorsing the gloaming.

All of this is to say that Go is a thoroughly well-composed, well-rounded collection. Though this applies comprehensively in my view in terms of poetic style, I will confess that I had some personal difficulty with a small number of the pieces which focused primarily on feelings of hope and gratitude. There is a certain kind of poem, often taking the form of a list and making use of anaphora, which makes a case for hopefulness by highlighting many small, perhaps oft-overlooked beauties (my mind jumps to Jan Zwicky’s “You Must Believe in Spring” as a brilliant example). Though I am entirely sympathetic to the impetus behind these poems, I cannot help but find that they often ring somewhat hollow emotionally. Leedahl writes in a similar mode in such pieces as “What is Good,” “Let Us,” and “Ways to be Happier,” and while all possess fine images and expert pacing, I would certainly say that I did not enjoy them as much as other, more emotionally vulnerable elements of the text.

Whatever one’s reaction to the book’s various emotional resonances, it is certainly the case that Go is a fantastic book of poetry. It is stylistically varied and sonically adventurous, and it is resolute, courageous, and caring. In a society that is currently being scoured by loneliness, it is particularly impactful and timely. It is an admirable collection, and comes highly recommended.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their longsheet A Decision Re:Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020, and their poetry and reviews have been featured in a variety of outlets. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station. Their summer plans consist mainly of reading newspapers and playing Chaos Galaxy.

Ethan Vilu : Serenades, by Rosaire Appel

Serenades, Rosaire Appel
Non Plus Ultra, 2021

 

 

In an artist’s statement available on the publisher’s website, Rosaire Appel offers the phrase asemic music as an explanatory term for the current parameters of her practice. Drawing from the concept of asemic writing (that is, markings without semantic value that nonetheless intuitively look like writing), Appel gestures precisely towards the visual distillation of music and sound which constitutes her work in Serenades. It is a fascinating, thought-provoking, and above all mysterious process – in Appel’s work, everyday sonic moments are made subject to a kind of attentive criticism. The work produced is radically unfaithful in its transmission of its source material – it must be, like all interpretation – but it is by virtue of this fact that it draws out previously unknown insights. Each page in Serenades is a cavalcade of aural information, judiciously refracted through the prism of Appel’s subtle artistry.

Although the pieces in Serenades are to a certain extent based on distortions of the rudiments of musical notation (mutated staves, notes, rests and clefs abound), these symbols act merely as a starting point for the visual poet’s sonic explications. Each page of the chapbook contains a multitude of abstract premises – some of my favorites resemble magnificent arcane diagrams, gesturing furtively (in my mind at least) to some esoteric feat of architecture or engineering. Others warp the hallmarks of sheet music into obstacle courses, treacherous walls which one imagines must urgently be scaled. This is a book that contains ancient codes, obscure and defiant declarations, transient visions and even rare moments of disconcerting clarity (the final page contains a single, perfectly clear bass clef). In terms of experience, Serenades is fundamentally an adventure, as mediated by the observer as by the artist’s initial transcription.

Indeed, it is on this last note that the heights of my appreciation for Appel’s chapbook rest – Serenades is a work which serves readily as a font of inspiration. For my fellow occasionally (or else perpetually) stymied poets, I would recommend this book as an experience which may well provoke and clarify. Appel’s sustained dedication to an original and insightful practice is enormously to her credit, and one can look to work like Serenades in order to observe the results of such commitment. It is a work of vibrancy, of imagination, and of insights gained through rigorously cultivated attention.

 

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station. Their February goal is to watch The Phantom Menace with director's commentary.    

Ethan Vilu : Poisonous If Eaten Raw, by Alyda Faber

Poisonous If Eaten Raw, Alyda Faber
Goose Lane Editions, 2021

 

 

 

Alyda Faber’s second full-length collection is a series of experimental portrait poems, dedicated to and ultimately concerned with the poet’s late mother. Through the use of a wide variety of imaginatively developed analogies, Faber meditates upon generational trauma, the profound difficulties of her mother’s life and the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship. As a thematically unified book, Poisonous If Eaten Raw is distinguished from many similarly conceived projects by its unflinching focus and inexhaustible commitment to its subject matter.  Though some of the included pieces deal explicitly with reflections on works of visual art (one stand-out poem situates the mother within Vincent van Gogh’s The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital), the entire text can in a larger sense be seen as a work of continuous ekphrasis – an explication of a subject, vivid and yet radically ineffable, from which the poet cannot turn away.

The gravity of Poisonous If Eaten Raw’s task is immediately conveyed in the book’s opening pages, and from there the work does not let up at any point. “Portrait of My Mother as a Funnel Spider,” the first poem in the text, introduces the book’s central concerns with a masterfully sustained sense of pacing: “Abandoned to cluster flies and spiders / since mother died, flaps of floral wallpaper sag / in my old bedroom; the mattress, still the same / after forty years, swallows me into a trench.”. Thematic layers are gradually introduced as the book progresses: the mother’s history as an immigrant, her decades spent in an abusive, terrorizing marriage; her often adversarial relationship with the external world and her profound interior life as made legible through prayer and religiosity. The overall portrait which Faber creates is both unadorned and yet firmly grounded in an ardent, admirable empathy.

At a poetic level, Faber’s work is exquisite. The pieces in Poisonous If Eaten Raw are crafted with extraordinary ability. One of the book’s most remarkable elements is a profusion of succinct and yet fully realized images – “Her eyes / mortgaged to a love that drives / the rain through open windows.” (from “Portrait of My Mother as the Duke of Kent”) is a potent example. One of my favorite parts of the book (indeed, one of the best things I’ve read in some time) is this section from “Camperdown Elm”:

Contorted branches sport
casual spring jewellery,
clusters of pale green oval coins.
No glitter, they shrivel or fall
without much fuss. Summer
leaves, dishpan hands. Late autumn
foliage: muted lamps in grey rain.

The amount of terrain covered in this brief set of lines, and the utter vividness of the images, strikes me as being exceptional. Throughout the book, one finds natural beauty, domestic moments (sometimes peaceful, often harrowing), fantastic scenes from the works of Joseph Beuys and Salvador Dali, and all manner of other phenomena, poetically rendered with palpable attention and rigour.

Beyond this level of construction, Faber also displays expertise in terms of her poems’ sonic qualities. Understated and yet affecting use of alliteration, assonance, and deftly placed rhymes infuse Poisonous If Eaten Raw with a sense of wholehearted care, and reflect the poet’s commitment to the book’s conceptual premise. Lines like “Garden an aquarium in dull rain, / hydrangea heads bow, bee balm / and pink phlox sink towards the lawn.” (from “Portrait of My Mother on the Kitchen Window”) make the difficult look easy, linking lush, compelling sounds over the course of each poem in the text. That Faber is able to sustain this quality through the variety of emotional resonances which make up the collection is impressive.

As a book which is wholly concerned with some of the most central, vulnerable elements of the human experience – the life and death of a loved one, and the drive to truly understand another human being – Poisonous If Eaten Raw is a product of real courage, and an unequivocal success. Faber’s formal brilliance, clarity, and compassion have resulted in a text which has the potential to provide solace and insight to anyone who reads it. It is a formidable achievement, and a book to which I will definitely return. 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station. Beyond writing and editing, they have recently been learning how to control distance with a pitching wedge.

Ethan Vilu : Kitotam: He Speaks To It, by John McDonald

Kitotam: He Speaks To It, John McDonald
Radiant Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

As the reader is informed through the book’s back cover, the Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word “Kitotam” can be translated into English as “he speaks to it”. It is an elegantly fitting title for John McDonald’s new collection, whose direct, heartfelt poems form an excellent example of poetry-as-testament. Utilizing elegy, meditation, and narrative, McDonald chronicles his life with a keen eye and the utmost of care. Through this effort, the reader is brought to a particular state of awareness - there is both subtle beauty and immense injustice in this book, and both are conveyed in a manner of devastating clarity.

I do not at all wish to oversimplify the collection – there are also great moments of irreverence (as in “Adrian”, wherein McDonald castigates those who would make the same tired joke about his middle name) and potent reflections on artistry (particularly in “The Canvas”, a stand-out poem), among numerous other elements. I simply find myself drawn to the poet’s real capacity for capturing the ineffable moods of past eras of one’s life, in all their suffering and joy. The former is brought out in relentless fashion in “For Bernice” (itself a beautiful poem of tribute), wherein McDonald provides a list of brutal, unmerited judgements cast upon him and others: “We were Indians / Decimated and ignorant races not worth the welfare cheques”. The reader is left no room for equivocating, and is made to bear witness to the oppressive pain and difficulty which marked the poet’s experience as an urban Indigenous youth. The latter, that joy (often tinged with melancholy, as with all remembrance) is perfectly demonstrated in “Growing Up in PA” (i.e., Prince Albert, Saskatchewan), in a stanza that merits being quoted at length:

Those good times, few though they were
Young hellions run amok in the city
Raiding crabapple trees and chokecherry bushes
Riding stolen bikes down the sidewalks
Finding treasures in garbage cans and dragging them back home

This stanza – straightforward, conversational yet declarative, a little wistful – does a profoundly good job of capturing that vague feeling of looking back on adolescence. There are moments like this throughout Kitotam, and they create a stunning image of the poet’s life – a painting of incredible subtlety.

In terms of form, the work is characterized by frequent and masterful use of poetic repetition. This tendency is taken to an extreme in poems such as “Saskatchewan River Blues” (the opening piece in the text) and “The View”, both of which are list poems oriented around a repeated word or short phrase (“water” and “Look across”, respectively). Where I most enjoyed this emphasis on repeated language was in poems such as “My Grandfather’s Hands” and “Smoke”, which use modified repetition (often taking advantage of the reader’s anticipation) to produce strong poetic effects. Though much of the book is conversational in tone, there are engaging sonic moments at many points – as in “The grey boards brittle beneath / Summer suns and winter winds”, from “The Farmhouse”, or this graceful section from “On the Death of Mr. Dressup, September 2001”:

Cloaked in borrowed clothes and fables of old
From the Tickle Trunk
To the open souls of the young

McDonald’s unfailing, unfeigned concern for the people, events, and reflections which form the subject of his poetry is reflected at the level of structure. These are deeply enjoyable poems, both light and imbued with piercing lucidity.

There are many dimensions to the artistic work that John McDonald takes on in Kitotam, and all of them make crucial contributions to the quality of the text. The suffering, injustice, and resulting righteous indignation are fully tied in with the love, nostalgia, and profoundly expressed appreciation and mourning. It is the way that it is, I suppose, with any earnestly lived life, and therein lies Kitotam’s supreme accomplishment. This book is an account which is remarkable and beautiful in its fullness – a testament to which the reader will be grateful to have been able to bear witness.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a student, writer, and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decisionre: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. In addition to serving as the current managing editor for NōD Magazine, Ethan works as both circulation manager and as a member of the poetry collective at filling Station. Currently passionate about absurdism, memory, and the dying art of golf club forging, Ethan can always be found working on a series of interminable manuscripts.

Ethan Vilu : Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, by Michael Lithgow

Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, Michael Lithgow
Cormorant Books, 2021

 

 

 

A recurring thought flickered in my head as I read through Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, Michael Lithgow’s second collection of poetry. It was this: that it is a truly rare thing for a book’s mood and essence to be captured so effectively in its cover art. Angel Guerra’s gorgeous design sets high-impact words against a washed-out, pensive blue background; in my view, this effectively reproduces the central dynamic of Lithgow’s poetry. Who We Thought We Were as We Fell is a book that positively trembles with melancholy, and which strains for and routinely achieves real clarity against a fully pervasive and deeply somber backdrop. It is from this commendable effort that its many moments of beauty arise.

At the level of poetic technique, Lithgow’s work throughout this text can be characterized as pleasantly understated. The sonic quality of the poems in Who We Thought We Were as We Fell is sustained without coming across as excessive – even playful internal rhymes (such as “their pale shades of vinyl / siding hiding everything,” from “Lengths of Grass”) do not distract from the rigorously focused nature of much of the work. Neither does Lithgow’s commitment to a controlled poetic approach bar him from using compellingly unsettling imagery, as when feelings of grief “turned in my stomach like a cold fat snake” (in “What I Did With Mourning in the Morning, After My Father Died”), or when “the tops of far-off buildings appear like small teeth” (in “Hospital Morning”). Many of the poems in this book show Lithgow to be incredibly proficient in the art of poetic pacing – one can look to “At the Podiatrist’s”, one of the longer pieces in the text. A clear-eyed meditation on aging, it builds on itself with a quiet ferocity until it reaches its apex in this fantastic line: “I won’t be lamed by time just yet, but I’ve tasted its incivility, / and it’s not the first I’ve heard star dust roaring in my ears.”. This piece (among many others) is emblematic of the poet’s admirable ability to sit with the indignities of life, to contemplate their strange ineffability, and to persevere in attempting to set them out in words.

Though this commitment to a relentless contemplation is present throughout Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, not every poem in the book is imbued with the same level of focus. Temporarily leaving aside the pieces which have more of a prose poem sensibility (which are nearly all excellent – I have the impression that this is Lithgow’s specialty), I would contrast the poems “Barnacle” and “Love and Rockets” in the hope of illustrating the uneven nature of parts of the work. The former piece is both effectively concise and keenly observant (and furthermore contains one of the most enjoyable rhymes in the book, with “I feel them turn towards me / as I pass. Snowdrops are low / and blind in the grass.”). “Love and Rockets” is unfocused in comparison, containing discordant mixed images and a fairly clumsy attempt at overcoming a cliché through acknowledgment (the opening line of the poem being “O for fuck’s sakes another poem about the agonies of love”). There are a handful of poems in this book that feel more like sketches than complete declarations, though this fact does not take away from the brilliance of much of the text. If anything, it simply serves as a reminder of the profoundly complex and harrowing nature of the subject matter that Lithgow deals in.

In reading Who We Thought We Were as We Fell, one is imbued with that melancholic feeling which is so familiar to so many of us – and then, through the clarity of the poet’s observations and connections, that feeling takes on a subtle change, becomes slightly less opaque. In a world where everyone must live with grief and perpetual indignity, it is a sincerely heartening thing to have effective literary examples, in terms of both reckoning and perseverance. It is a project of tremendous difficulty that Lithgow takes on with this book, and the high degree to which he succeeds is very much worthy of praise.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a student, writer, and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decision re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. In addition to serving as the current managing editor for NōD Magazine, Ethan works as both circulation manager and as a member of the poetry collective at filling Station. Currently passionate about absurdism, memory, and the dying art of golf club forging, Ethan can always be found working on a series of interminable manuscripts.