rob mclennan : Lantern, by Sanna Wani

Lantern, Sanna Wani
Anansi, 2026

 

 

 

The second full-length poetry title by Sanna Wani, following My Grief, the Sun (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2022), is Lantern (House of Anansi, 2026), a collection that self-describes as “Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s Lantern explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood?” Structured into cluster-sections of lyrics—“CRAFT,” “LOVE,” “ETHOS,” “FAITH” and “GRIEF”—Wani articulates moments around entering and settling into adulthood, from childhood memory and parents, relationships and responsibilities to community, responsibilities to those one has lost and to memory itself. “There are things that keep us sane,” she writes, to open the short prose poem “SAFETY BLANKET,” “and things that don’t. For / me, it’s a blanket as old as I am. What keeps us alive, / keeps us alive.” These are poems about settling into a space and looking around, both forward and back, and within the present moment. Assessing where one is, and where one has been. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my Nana lately.” begins the opening prose poem, “SEPTEMBER 26, 2020,” articulating a narrative around memory and loss. A bit further on in the same poem, writing: “What would he make of my work? I wish I / could talk to him. He is my work now. There is nothing I write that is not / his.”

There is an interesting way that Wani’s poems seek clarity, as well as clarification, attempting details from recalled events, occasionally caught in the weeds of her own memory, and questioning what she might previously have been unaware. There is a gentle sense of urgency on where she is now and how she got here, and the sense that she needs to reevaluate, whether for city living, adult responsibilities or what memory might hold. “Consider the kiln the clay will soon / enter,” she writes, as part of the poem “POTTERY CLASS ON DUNDAS STREET,” “its chances to crack or explode. / Consider explosions part of the process.” One could say that the lantern itself is used to light one’s way, to illuminate what otherwise would be only dark, and here she is, attempting exactly that, across a sequence of first-person narrative stretches that meditate and question as much as they reveal. At times, Wani’s details seem to hold to the abstract for dear life, offering a slippage from the concrete to the metaphysical, or allowing a stitch of the sentimental a thread, such as the poem “WINTER STORM,” that includes:

Recently, I tried to write a poem that started with, When it snows / the whole
world is in love. Sometimes I confuse love with silence. Stillness. I’ve been
reading up on comfort and chaos. I like missing you. I like watching the
day kiss the ground. If you were here, you would tell me some fact about the
history of snow or how it isn’t really white.

I will admit I reacted, slightly, to the line “I use language’s tricks when I have nothing else to say.” from the poem “THE BEER STORE,” fully aware of how much a line such as this highlights Wani’s approach to these poems, far different from my own (through which those explorations through language are entirely the point). Although, while still working her point-driven lyric narratives, Wani’s directions wander in curious ways, offering a softer sense of narrative sharpness, of egress and build-up, allowing the question of where certain poems might actually end up. She offers such delicate surprise, articulating moments, held in the hand; composing notes on moments between moments, across lines not carved in stone but gently crafted. She writes of ethics amid grief, cultural inheritance and loss, including echoes of Partition, and the need for clear-eyed resoluteness during periods of upheaval. “What use is reverence in catastrophe?” she asks, for example, as part of the poem “LULLABY FOR GAZA.” I appreciate how Wani articulates through poems questions around what it is she should be doing, what poems could or should do, or even what can be done at all. It is said that our purpose on this earth is to find our purpose, and these poems work through some heavy questions of what precisely her purpose, both through and beyond the shape and scale of writing, should be. What use, then, poems? And her answers, as she finds them, not set as forever, but in those very moments, allowing for the evolution of her own thinking to progress, as it requires. A few lines further, in the same piece, as she provides: “We can’t give up. My job is to tell you about the light, [.]”

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is a person, place or thing. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), is currently up for the Archibald Lampman Award, which might be his seventh time up for this particular award, making him, most likely, the Diane Warren of the Archibald Lampman Award.

Stan Rogal : notes from the field : Launch of The Wren: poems by Al Moritz

The Wren, Al Moritz
Anansi, 2026

 

 

 

Al sent me an email invitation to attend the launch of his latest poetry collection, The Wren, out with Anansi Press. Al and I have known each other casually for several decades, though I’d say we’ve met up more so at different literary or art events in recent years, by ‘recent years’ meaning post-COVID shutdown, and certainly quite often at the newly established, informative and entertaining, Soluble Fish ‘all-things-art’ talk series organized by writers Beatriz Hausner and Russell Smith, usually at the Free Times Café, though also now occurring from time to time at the venerable Arts and Letters Club.

The launch took place Thursday April 9 at the Flying Books Bookstore on College Street, Toronto, an enterprising enterprise established by Martha Sharpe, formerly of Anansi Press and Simon & Schuster, that combines a bricks-and-mortar bookstore with writing workshops, a mentorship program and a publishing house. There were maybe twenty chairs arranged in the space, though it didn’t take long for those chairs to fill, so that a majority of the audience was standing room only, leaned against the bookshelves and gathered straight back to the store entrance. It was a mixed-age crowd that likely included friends, teaching and literary associates, and former students of Al. Fortunately, there was a functioning sound system in place enabling the speakers to be heard amid the shuffle of feet.

Michael Redhill acted as emcee. He explained that he and Al went back many years as friends as well as having had a teacher/student relationship. Michael was also the editor for Al’s latest collection, all of which added an air of informality and camaraderie to the occasion which extended to include members of the audience. While Michael pointed out Al as an award-winning poet, he also noted that the celebrated and award-winning author Michael Ondaatje was in attendance as well as Karen Solie, who had recently won the prestigious and lucrative Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry. Of course, Michael Redhill himself was a former Giller Prize recipient.

Al read in his usual concise and articulate manner, adding short anecdotes and his own brand of droll humour as he proceeded. He mentioned that he wanted to keep the reading relatively short since it was to be followed both by a Q&A with Michael, as well as by a surprise presentation, whether a surprise for Al or for the audience or both, I wasn’t sure. The reading concluded with much applause.

During the Q&A, banter was exchanged about the impetus for the book’s creation as well as inquiring about Al’s writing process. Michael mentioned that he was always amazed at Al’s ability to remember people and events from years past as well as able to recite poems (or parts of poems) from diverse sources. Al, ever self-effacing, joked that it only seemed that he remembered more than the next person because he tended to dominate the conversations. This tickled the audience, having probably gone through the experience of conversing with Al themselves and — despite his attempt to deflect — felt a similar gobsmacked admiration for his sense of recall.

The surprise arrived with the introduction of four members of the Bengali community who were instrumental in starting up a newspaper-type magazine to include translations of the works of Canadian poets, Al being newly selected. He was, of course, delighted by the presentation. A woman read a poem in Bengali followed by Al’s recital in English. The evening ended with more applause and a line-up to purchase signed copies of The Wren.

It was a convivial, fun, and successful event. Warm congratulations to Al. I’d like to thank all those folks involved with the launch in particular. Big thanks and tip-of-the-hat as well going out to the other names I mentioned above — and to their projects — that keep poetry and the arts scene LIVE in Toronto.

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

 

 

Heidi Elder : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Brandi Bird

 

Brandi Bird [photo credit: Geoffrey Wallang] is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, the Tsleil-Waututh, and the Musqueam peoples (Surrey, B.C). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (Anansi, 2023), won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert and the Governor General’s awards. Brandi Bird is currently completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Their latest book is Pitiful (Anansi, 2026).

Brandi Bird reads in Ottawa alongside Declan Ryan and Stephanie Bolster at The Manx Pub Plan 99 event on Saturday, March 28, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

You mention in your “Acknowledgements” that Pitiful’s “skeleton” was written in only two months. What was it about those two months that allowed the collection to take form? How does Pitiful fit in with the rest of your work and what is new and/or exciting about it for you?

I wrote the first draft of the long poem “Post-Memory” in one very sleepless night in the spring of 2024. I didn’t have the intention of starting a new book of poetry and was more interested in writing fiction and personal essay, two genres I’m trying to get a better grasp of. The freedom I felt when I removed the identifier of “poet” from my egoic makeup and just started “doing shit” made it possible for me to follow my obsessions to their end.

I’ve been recovered (which for myself means abstinent from all behavioural aspects of bulimia) since 2018, and I’ve been trying to write about appetite, desire, and control for my entire life (unsuccessfully). It wasn’t until I spat out “Post-Memory” that I understood I was finally prepared to face the ugliness and shame at the heart of most of the choices I’ve made in my life to simply survive our world.

Pitiful marks a new direction for me in my poetic practice because I wrote it without the resentment I felt editing my first book. When I started writing as an adult in 2016, I was confused about who I was writing for and how to make myself legible to that imaginary audience. I ended up hating my audience until I recognized the “audience” was actually an effigy I’d crudely sewn together of myself. When I revisit The All + Flesh, I feel the undercurrent of smouldering resentment and genuine care and love that I put into it. Pitiful was an effort to celebrate the rage and disgust I’ve worked my entire life to bury. I dug out its rotten, diseased corpse and decided to bring it into your bedsheets proud as a cat with a dead rat. 

To borrow again from your “Acknowledgements,” you mention that the poems began “unconcerned with anyone’s approval or understanding” but your own; yet you also mention its position amongst pop culture, history, and other writers. How does the collection balance these two boundaries, or rather, does it dwell in the overlap? Where does the reader stand now, for you, in response to a collection published in this vein?

I don’t think there are boundaries between myself and the images, texts, and historical contexts I’ve studied or experienced at all. I’ve cultivated my eye and taste and methods for analysis through a lifetime of obsession and curiosity. I change my mind all the time through a constant practice of integration and reintegration. All knowledge overlaps. My audience is anyone who will listen or read a pull quote while bored scrolling through their Instagram feed. I finally don’t feel the crushing responsibility to create a knowable or legible persona.

I am not an Indigenous poet. I am a poet who is Indigenous and comes from that historical legacy, but I’m also a weird, perverted bitch, and I’ve studied whiteness for my entire life. Every native person has too. I’m someone who is a clone of a clone of a clone of every cool, edgy and/or serious writer I’ve admired. I didn’t even know Indigenous people could be poets until I met Katherena Vermette at an Indigenous Writer’s Circle group when I was 17. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me.

When I read Liz Howard’s and Jordan Abel’s work in 2016, I copied their voices until I developed my own monstrous intensity and ethos. I grew up a citizen of the early internet, posting on LiveJournal and then Tumblr. I learned about sex by exploring gay erotic fanfiction at way too young an age and posted underage “thinspo” to LJ communities created to inspire weight loss. I was an active poster on forums for girls who ostensibly weren’t pro-anorexia/bulimia, but we still inevitably triggered each other.

Pop Culture has the power to reinforce and revise history, and Blade Runner or Succession or Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me the writer I am, regardless of their artistic quality. Roman Roy is just as important to me as Sylvia Plath because disgust and fascination drive my work more than any other emotional states. 

To further expand on the concept of intertextuality, several of your poems reference depictions of eating disorders within television. What does it mean for your work to exist within and be shaped by a web of pop culture references? These poems “Notes on…” often include a dedication; what will prompt you to dedicate one poem over another? What does it mean for you to write for/about/within your communities and then share in this way?

The “Notes on…” poems are less about textual depictions of eating disorders on television and more about the fantastical construction of appetite, power, and sexuality that I’ve built within those men. They’re poems about masculinity written explicitly to counteract the “girl-ification” of suffering in literature/media about eating disorders. I mean, I don’t think I’ve been treated like a girl anywhere in this world since I grew tits and started smoking cigarettes at the ripe old age of thirteen (unless girlhood includes getting detained at fifteen for solicitation and on suspicions that I was dealing crack from my bike in downtown Winnipeg).

The “Notes on…” poems are cheeky things, little humiliation rituals for myself, as much as they are for other fans of these fictional men too, these terribly sad “babygirls,” these first crushes and sad loverboys whom women and girls and women-who-were-never-actually-women-at-all project themselves onto.

The poems are coated in disgust and fascination and desire and envy and ugliness. They get to the core of what I’m trying to say in Pitiful while also being fun as hell to read to a group of people. I simply dedicated each poem to a friend who shares a love for the respective fandoms I’m gesturing towards. They know why!

 

 

 

 

Heidi Elder (she/her) is a writer and editor from Ottawa, Ontario. She has edited for Understorey Magazine, Common House Magazine, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She currently works for CANREADS and is on the board of VERSe Ottawa. Her work has appeared in VISTAS (Vol. 41), Polar Expressions (Seaside, 2024), Echolocation (Vol. 23), Generation (forthcoming), and more.

Amanda Earl : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Zoe Whittall

 

Zoe Whittall is a bestselling novelist and TV writer. Her novel The Best Kind of People was a finalist for the Giller prize and named Indigo’s #1 book of the year. The New York Times called her fourth novel The Spectacular “a highly readable testament to the strength of the maternal bond” and The Toronto Star called it “a singularly impressive piece of fiction.” She won a Lamda literary award for her second novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie prize for her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts. She won a Canadian Screen Award as part of the writing team for The Baroness Von Sketch Show. Her latest books are No Credit River (poetry/memoir), Wild Failure (short fiction), and The Fake (a novel). She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Zoe Whittall reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 28 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

Amanda Earl: In Ars Poetica, you mention that you read everything labelled autofiction, and you are drawn to autofiction as an alienated truth. You say it permits stories without villains. Were you consciously reading autofiction to try to figure out the rules or conventions? Can you talk about why the idea of an “alienated truth” was attractive or generative to you?

Zoe Whittall: I love autofiction mostly because I love style, voice, language, and character more than I like plot. I like a tightly plot driven TV show, I love a meandering thought bubble of a book. Give me a slim volume about a girl sitting in bed thinking about her philosophies or feelings and I’m all over it. But part of what I love about it is its implicit unreliability, and the sort of gossip-y or fake closeness of feeling as though you’re sitting beside the author when they’re at their weirdest and they’re telling you secrets. But no one is ever really telling you secrets. They’re offering you a sculpture, highly cultivated, polished and chipped away at, that only looks raw or like it has an organic, improvised quality. Every word, phrase, moment, in any good book is deliberate. If it was just blurted out and messy it would be like when you look at a bad painting but you don’t know why it's bad but you know it somehow. And the secret is that the composition is off balance. But I love the lie of autofiction. It feels close to what I like about the new narrative movement which was this raw, circular, rule-breaking literature that was often about sex and oblivion and queerness with these unwieldy and wild sentences that felt like you were just reading someone’s scrawled vulnerabilities. So alienated truth was the most concise way I felt I could describe what I think the best kind of hybrid, personal texts can aim for.

AE: Creative nonfiction and memoir have overlapping qualities. This book is described also as a memoir in prose poetry. Can you talk about your experiences in trying to label this work?

ZW: Ok so here is where I confess that I assumed creative non-fiction and memoir were one and the same? Is the difference that CNF can be more creative – i.e., loose with the facts and more story-like? It started as a book of mostly prose poems, and the more I worked on it the more I started to see a book length narrative arc. And then I started to think about the confessional element and how I might be able to be more overt about it.

AE: In your Ex-Puritan interview with Kailey Havelock about your novel The Best Kind of People, you write “I used to feel more comfortable in first person, and sometimes I still do.” Now you are using first person and writing something that is so clearly about personal experience. How did you get more comfortable with writing in first?

ZW: I feel comfortable in first and third for different reasons. Both have an intimacy that you can’t get with the other. Sustaining first for an entire novel is difficult in terms of the constraint of what you can know, but it is also roomy and had a depth you can’t always get in the same way with third. I like them both.

AE: This book is so readable, relatable, funny, biting, and raw with self-deprecating humour. As a comedy writer, I imagine you hone your craft for timing and knowing what is humorous for an audience. In the book, did you have to try to be humorous or is this just how you are? Can you edit humour or is it something that just has to flow naturally?

ZW: It's something that comes naturally to me whenever I’m wrestling with an idea or how to think about something. Certainly it’s a defense mechanism and also how I understand the world. I’ve also been working as a comedy writer for TV and crafting jokes while also writing books for about ten years now, so the instinct is hard to turn off. I definitely edit humor the same way I would any sentence, for rhythm and pay off and I think about how long a line is and whether or not the joke is too quick or too long.

AE: One of the areas of the book which impressed me was the constant engagement with its form, the metatextuality of it. You refer to it as a “book of ideas” (4) and “A poem is four hundred years of lesbian gossip” (10). You say that “form is content” (15). Content can be both the substance of a work and a state of mind. The form here troubles or queers the journal/memoir/poetic form by playing with it, such as you do in the prose pantoum (20) or by using techniques such as imagery and repetition which hybridizes prose and poetry. You mention Dodie Bellamy and the New Narrative and mention that you were inspired by it? Can you give some examples of how it inspired you? Did it help you tackle ways in which to approach an unreliable memoir, for example?

ZW: I was thinking about something Dodie Bellamy said in an interview about how the new narrative movement was big on telling not showing. I think that unlocked something in me while writing this book, to stop being afraid of defining the genre and being fixed in any which way. I was, am, very influenced by that worlde of mostly queer avant garde writers who were unafraid to break with the conventions of the time, who wrote about shame with humor, sexuality, and dying – very much influenced by aids and the conservatism of the 80s, I imagine. The kind of confessional zine era I started writing in, those movements were in conversation with each other. New narrative writers were so daring on the page with what looked like confession but was highly artful and audacious, using real names and real events, but twisting and subverting it all. I returned to Kathy Acker and Gary Indiana and Gail Scott while writing the book, I was looking for permission to really go wild after a few years of writing fairly conventional novels, form-wise.

AE: There are vivid details in the book. Is writing a journal or diary part of your everyday practice or something you did to work on this book?

ZW: I journalled obsessively in my younger years but I haven’t been consistent about it in a long time. So some of the details I’m looking back on are from photographs or are just particularly memorable, others start as a sensory detail from a journal and then I expand on them or make them more stark or interesting.

AE: What is it like to read the book to an audience? Are there certain parts that you don’t read or wish to avoid reading? Are you surprised at what people laugh at?

ZW: I mostly read from the ars poetica and any of the poems with humor because they work better out loud. Especially since I started writing for comedy shows and doing some stand-up, I’m most comfortable if I can make at least a few people in the audience laugh. There are certainly poems I don’t think would work from the stage.

AE: In some ways, the book could be a handbook for the broken-hearted, especially in its reference to transmasculine and femme butch relationships, which as you mention is rare. I love the idea of writing the book you wish to see in the world. I feel like this is a book I wish to see in the world, including the wisdom you share and its hybridity. I am grateful to you for sharing your grief, your heartbreak and your experiences as a writer. Do you think you will play with this unreliable memoir, prose poem format again? How does it compare to writing fiction for you?

ZW: Thank you! I will definitely write more prose poetry. I love the form. I love a long line and small stories pushing up against imagery and comedy and fragments. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be explicit about writing memoir again. Depends on what happens in my life, I suppose?

AE: Can you achieve an objective distance from your writing at the editing stage when you so closely write about grief and heartbreak?

ZW: I think so, or you can close to it. And then you have the gift of an objective editor who can remind you what is artful or what the interesting idea might be that you’re wrestling with, and then what is the diary stuff that can be cut to make the work better and real.

AE: You mention that your ex will hate the book but will never read it (51). Did you feel you had to be careful in how you depicted him in the book?

ZW: Yes. The book is about me and my grief process, I offer very few specific details about him and I did that on purpose bc it felt like the ethical thing to do. As a reader I love the gore of gossip and confession but as a writer I can’t help but always think of the real people I love and have loved and their feelings.

AE: “There’s the way I live and the way I want to live.” I feel like this could be a refrain for queer people and their lives, that feeling of having to fit into some concept of heteronormativity that is shoved down our throats through film, tv, etc. Do you find models for the way you want to live in art, literature and film and do they act as solace or reassurance? Today, given the rise of homophobia and transphobia and removal of rights, especially in the USA, do you feel like your work might help queer and trans people feel less alone?

ZW: I’m not sure. I’ve certainly heard from a lot of readers so far who have felt seen in terms of the specific kind of heartbreak devastation that can happen when you end a relationship with someone who was very push-and-pull emotionally, where you feel caught in a kind of addictive cycle. It’s a strange, surreal kind of dynamic, not quite like regular heartbreak or grief because there is an added feeling of such utter confusion for which way is up or down. The line about the way I live and the way I want to live was for me about the things you say and believe about who you are in relationship and how you’re getting by, and then the truth of those most sorrowful moments.

The rise of transphobia right now is so terrifying. I feel like I can’t even make sense of how bad it is getting every day. I feel like we have to prepare for war and I’m not being an hysterical leftist overstating harm, I really do feel like it’s a new era and I’m very scared.

AE: I appreciated your inclusion of the details of the literary life: awards, artist retreats, toxic CanLit, struggles to write, responses to fan mail, etc.

ZW: I couldn’t write about the last ten years of my life without mentioning the strangeness of life as a full time writer within this particular world of Can Lit. So many things happened all at once, and it was a very exciting time but in some ways any artist’s career has extreme ups and downs. It mirrored the relationship in a way. So there was chaos everywhere. And I dislike reading memoir by artists where they leave out the day to day practical details of being an artist.

AE: “I can’t choose safety as an artist…” (71) Did writing and publishing this work help you work through your grief and heartbreak and did it make you feel unsafe? How do you cope with such feelings?

ZW: I’m not sure if it helped me cope, but it did help to write a story of it all.

AE: “My feelings were so big I was stumbling through our life together, a messy chaos monster.” (51) I think a lot of people will relate to this book and I appreciate your sharing your stumbles. Thank you for writing no credit river and for being willing to be open about your experiences.

ZW: Thank you, Amanda! Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a writer, editor, mentor, reviewer, publisher, living on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Hire her as an editor or literary event organizer. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of near-death long poems. More info: AmandaEarl.com. Linktr.ee/AmandaEarl