Manahil Bandukwala : Introduction
Conyer Clayton : Failing to find a line by Robert Creeley in a book by Frank Stanford
Ellen Chang-Richardson : ghazal for shifting perspective
Grace : Ode to My Cat
Misha Solomon : Puppy Sounds
Dani Spinosa : Iphigenia
Jade Wallace : All night I stare at the TV screen—
Sanna Wani : Drafting
When rob asked me if working for a publisher gave me a different outlook on poetry and poets, I was in the thick of acquisitions, and all I could think about was how much books can change from the initial manuscript to the published version the public sees. There are so many edits, revisions, versions, and cuts—especially cuts. Poems we hold dear don’t end up making the final cut.
When I finalized edits for Heliotropia, I had a folder of poems that didn’t quite fit the direction the book took, or poems that repeated themes that didn’t need repeating. When my book came out, I was too busy touring to send these solo poems off to magazines. When the promotional dust settled, it was too late, and I felt too disconnected from the poems and from the process of submitting to magazines to reach into that folder.
For this folio, I reached out to poets with recent or soon forthcoming poetry collections. I asked them for a poem that, for whatever reason, was part of an early version of their book, but isn’t in the version we buy and read. I didn’t ask why these poems were cut, but I will say that the reason isn’t that the poem itself isn’t good enough. I hope this folio gives a peek at the many-layered process of putting together a poetry manuscript, and makes you curious enough to check out the fantastic books of the poets featured.
Manahil Bandukwala
is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024; shortlisted for the Pat
Lowther Award, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Ottawa Book Award, and winner
of the Archibald Lampman Award) and MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022).
She was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her
work at manahilbandukwala.com.
folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
We pull away from the mountain and the path
meanders to form the letter s
signifying the beginning of breathing
together through the night. All the river creatures,
carp and beavers alike, exit their burrows to swim
or crawl to the first bed they happen upon. I whisper
to you in the humidity. How it takes
the shape of scepters,
of jungle cats. So detailed we can make out
each strand of fur on its magnificent
pride. The ghosts inhabiting each miniscule hole
left by a nail once hammered into the wall
feel the first semblance of rest in centuries
and emerge.
Everything has a point of origin and the beginning
of calm starts the moment one of us falls asleep,
really sleeping, with little to no dreams
because the dream is to be within touching distance
and here we are, always finding
new ways to say goodbye to the night.
First published in Augur Magazine
My current writing project is fiction! I’m at the tail end of putting together a manuscript of speculative short stories that explore themes of heat catastrophes, climate crisis, Pakistani folklore, and the presence of magic in our urban spaces. In these stories, a woman turns into a cup of tea to escape her abusive boyfriend; a man facing stalking from an ex-girlfriend finds a protection story passed down through women in his family, and a woman finds a tragic folktale that eerily resembles her own life, and fears the same outcome occurring to her.
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual
artist. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024; winner of
the Archibald Lampman Award, and shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, the
Raymond Souster Award, and the Ottawa Book Award) and MONUMENT
(Brick Books 2022; shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award). She has been
twice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust
of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025), is a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Hajer’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland.
Revolutions is described as being about shame and pleasure, and how they intersect. In particular, I resonated with the instances of hiding and deflecting, and how that’s held in fraught tension with the relationships we hold dear. How does putting the book out to a public audience respond, in a meta-textual way, to this hiding?
I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought enough about what would happen once the work became public. When I was writing it, I was so focused on remaining “true” to my experience at the time, I hadn’t really thought about future Hajer reading the poems in front of an audience. Of course, I had considered certain levels of censorship and protection. It’s why I introduced the character “xxxxxxx”. When writing the book, I had recorded conversations with young women in my community about shame and pleasure. Their identities are all concealed, they all appear as xxxxxxx to both keep them anonymous and to portray the collectivity of their stories. Beyond that, I didn’t really consider concealing myself. I think the book very obviously reads as auto-biographical (I even use my own name at one point). It definitely has been exposing and vulnerable having the book out in public and doing events. The most difficult part is perhaps the reception by my mom. But I think it helped us have good conversations and a better understanding of each other. Overall, I think she is supportive of me as a writer. She was interviewed for the book as well, so she is deeply embedded in it.
I do love though that the publication of the book does what I could not do while writing it, which is to explode the system of shame of suppression, to get out of the circle. I’m writing about being trapped, and in writing, I escape the trap. I did an event last summer for the Cross-Pollination series by the League of Canadian Poets (in which they pair a poet with a health care worker) with my cousin, the psychotherapist Zainib Abdullah and she talked about how the antidote to shame is courage. I think it was courageous of me to write and publish this book, to expose myself in this way. It helped me heal and work through a lot of the shame I felt growing up. It’s especially fulfilling when I do a reading and a woman comes up to me after and says, I had the same experiences. I can’t believe you’re writing so openly about sex and masturbating. How are you doing it? I think I just had to do it. I had to get these things out and share them. None of us should carry all our shame alone. The more we share with each other, the lighter the load we each have to carry.
That being said, I am definitely thinking about how to better protect myself with my next book, which will be a thematic sequel to Revolutions and a deeper exploration of shame that gets more into childhood trauma. How do I create a bit more distance between myself as the subject and as the poet? I am now considering future Hajer who will read those poems in front of an audience and may have to reveal certain things that happened to her. I’m considering ways in which I can write about my life without writing in first-person. I want to remove the “I” completely.
I’m curious about your extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s work, especially given a photograph of the piece appears in the book! Had you expected that outcome when putting the manuscript together?
When I first wrote Revolutions in 2019 for my MFA thesis, I got in contact with Mona Hatoum’s studio and told them what I was working on. Later, when I was working with my publisher, Talonbooks, we contacted her studio again to get permission to use a photo of + and –. They gave us permission for the photo and said Hatoum was interested in receiving a copy of the book when it came out, but I was never in contact with her directly. Maybe one day – you never know!
One interesting thing that happened is in the original manuscript, I had multiple photos of the sculpture at different points in its revolution that didn’t make it into the final book. I had taken the photos myself when I saw the piece in Barcelona. They weren’t good quality and we couldn’t get Hatoum’s team to redo them, so my copy editor, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and I thought of other ways to represent the sculpture. We ended up with the “clock” concrete poems (“her hand at one / her hand at seven”, etc.). They represent the two arms of + and – moving around the sand, and they also capture the themes of time and waiting that run throughout the book. It was a bit of a frustrating editorial issue that ended up leading to creative problem solving that I think is stronger and adds another layer of meaning that the original photos may not have been able to convey.
The “clock” concrete poems were one of many things I loved about the book. They featured as a constant grounding in the poetry and the words. I began to look forward to seeing how you were going to play with the word and page space. It’s fascinating hearing that this form evolved after the fact. Were there other aspects of the book that took form in the editorial process?
At the line level, the final book is relatively similar to the original manuscript I sent to Talon. I did however add two additional poems. The first was Ramadan Record which I had written in 2019 and removed from the manuscript because it didn’t seem to fit in cohesively with the rest of the book. Then I started to miss it and through it might work well in terms of amplifying the theme of time and providing another type of form in the middle of the book. I see it now as a kind of hinge point.
The second poem was Sift which is a new poem I wrote while working with my substantive editor, Rahat Kurd. She and I talked about whether I was doing the mother figure enough justice and thought it would make sense to have more of her perspective, to soften and lend more empathy to her. With Sift being the last poem in Revolutions, and written from the mother’s point of view, I see it as an addendum or commentary on the rest of the book.
I actually had to pull back a lot while editing to prevent myself from changing the integrity of the book. I was editing it five years after I had written it, so I had changed quite a bit as a person and as a poet. At the risk of publishing certain poems that I may now find underdeveloped or cringey, I’m glad I honoured Revolutions for what it is – a time capsule of what I was dealing with at that time.
Could you talk about incorporating the Arabic texting code into your poems?
The first poem I wrote for the book, before I really knew it was going to be this book, was 3aib, which means shame in Arabic. I had to use the word 3aib without translating it because 3aib holds so much weight and context. It means shame, but it doesn’t feel the same. Then I realized there is no other way to write 3aib so I have to introduce the texting code.
I should clarify here that I did not invent this code – it’s how Arabic-speaking people write to each other when transliterating to English. The numbers represent letters in Arabic with sounds that don’t exist in English. Some words, like habibi (my love) can be written as habibi or 7abibi. The 7 is the Arabic letter ح which is a hard h (kind of like the sound you’d make when warming up your hands). H works well enough but 7 is more accurate. But with the word 3aib, the 3 is the Arabic letter ع which is a guttural throaty sound, and there’s nothing like it in English. Writing just aib or eib would make no sense.
So for the 3aib poem, I figured that if I had to use the texting code for that word, why not use it for every transliterated word? I loved how the numbers looked on the page, so weird and computational. It was accurate to the language and also created a little secret between me and other Arabic-speaking people who would read the book (though this wasn’t my main motivator). I actually overuse the code to the point that it may even become complicated for Arabic-speaking people to translate. But I think a secret code is a perfect literary device for a book about secret lives and identities and hiding and censorship. Also, numbers are just really cool.
I loved your choice to include the code for all transliterated words! The numbers in the code worked so well visually with the clock concrete poems. You’ve mentioned your next book will be a thematic sequel to Revolutions. Do you envision the book having the same level of visual and linguistic experimentation, with the concreteness and the code?
Before writing Revolutions, I was strictly a lyric poet and it was in working with Margaret Christakos during my MFA that she introduced me to experimental feminist poetry and I began playing in that tradition. I love both styles of poetry so much and I think the next book while be somewhere in the middle. I know I want to challenge my diction a lot (it’s a weak spot for me) and I definitely imagine there will still be some visual experimentation. I’m writing and thinking a lot now about deeply rooted shame and trauma and repressed memories, so I am always asking myself what it means to write through the body. I don’t think lyric poetry alone is enough to answer that question.
I’m not sure what the shape will be exactly, but I do want to carry forward some of the procedures I began with Revolutions, particularly the research work of interviewing people. I love the idea of writing that’s created in community, sharing language with the people around me. It helps me expand my view and my vocabulary, and it also helps me feel less isolated while writing. I trust that as I work on the next book, the poems will help tell me what form they need to be in, and any experimental elements will come out organically.
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