Kate Cayley, Melanie Marttila, Mahaila Smith, Susan Gevirtz + Noah Berlatsky : virtual reading series #33

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Kate Cayley : “Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster”

Kate Cayley has published two short story collections, three collections of poetry, and a young adult novel, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre, most recently on The Archive of Missing Things and This Is Nowhere, and her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, The New Quarterly and The North American Review. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.

Melanie Marttila :“Imagined”

Melanie Marttila has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to CBC’s Pencil Box. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s masters program in English Literature and Creative Writing and her poetry has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

Mahaila Smith :“My Lethal Fear of Being Consumed” & “Overhang”

Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their recent chapbooks include Water-Kin (Metatron Press 2024) and Enter the Hyperreal (above/ground press 2024). Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is newly published with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their poems on their website: mahailasmith.ca.

Susan Gevirtz : reading 3 excerpts from the book AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger : “so they drove…” ; “Prologue / [to be read in Aviation English]” ; “Brief History of the Sky: A Manual for Air Traffic Controllers”

Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat). She is based in San Francisco.

Noah Berlatsky : “One Day Gravity Stopped,” “On Finding the Creature,” “Time Will Fuck You Blues” and “True Love”

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full-length collections are Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press, 2025), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, 2025) and Brevity (Nun Prophet, 2025).

Mahaila Smith : On Into the Hyperreal

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, when I was scrolling on Facebook, I saw a good example of what Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum. It was a screenshot of a tweet that included an image of a person holding a white mug. On the mug there was an image of another mug, this one in the shape of Gromit’s head, with two handles, a reference to the character from the claymation series Wallace and Gromit. Gromit is a beagle. Between beagles and this image of a tweet, there were so many layers of separation that the symbol had lost all relation to the original reference. Simulacra like this are fundamental to Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality, which describes the state of our world where we drown in media but lack true information, and live in a place where the concept of "real" no longer exists.

Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and the hyperreal have inspired me to write. As I was reading his work, I did something that Baudrillard would likely disapprove of, and wrote surreal, dissociative poems based on my lived reality. Enter the Hyperreal is an accumulation of those poems, written over the past four years.

I have found that writing ekphrastic poetry inspired by visual art allows me to easily enter the flow state I covet when writing these poems. One piecefrom this collection was inspired by the work of Diana Lynn VanderMeulen. I have a number of her fantastical neon landscapes hung up around my writing desk. Other influences on the collection include the poets Barbara Guest and Mark Strand, Stardew Valley, Dr. Strangelove, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and intellectuals like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler.

A number of these poems were written while I was enrolled in Stuart Ross' inspiring course, Poetry: Introduction, in the summer of 2022. Reading Stuart's own poetry in the years prior was the beginning of my realization that writing weird poems could be a thing. It fueled me to write weird poems of my own.

 

 

 

 

 

Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their debut chapbook, Claw Machine, was published by Anstruther Press in 2020. Their second chapbook, Water-Kin was published by Metatron Press in 2024. Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is forthcoming with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their work on their website: mahailasmith.ca.

Mahaila Smith will be launching Enter the Hyperreal on August 10 as part of the above/ground press 31st anniversary reading, alongside Gil McElroy, Carlos A. Pittella, Chris Banks, Pearl Pirie and Shane Rhodes; tickets available here.

photo credit: Curtis Perry [Smith reading at the Riverbed Reading Series, Ottawa]