Melanie Marttila : Ajar, by Margo LaPierre

Ajar, Margo LaPierre
Guernica Editions, 2025

 

 

 

This poetry collection is an intimate and vulnerable poetic memoir of what it’s like to experience the haunting fracturing of self that often results from mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder II with psychotic features.

That’s the diagnosis Ajar by Margo LaPierre both spirals toward and away from. The poems in this collection reflect a fracturing of thought, language, self, and of time itself. The phrase “I haunted me” repeats throughout the collection. Having contemplated suicide, having attempted it, she is intimately linked with death and the ghost that returns from that future death haunts her: “The future predicted itself, and I haunted me, / Briefly I thought other ghosts haunted me, but it was just me.”

The story LaPierre tells in this collection is non-linear, or perhaps more appropriately, alinear. Time agnostic? Events do not emerge from one another or grow organically so much as appear and surprise.

The self-haunting is not the only recurring motif. Substance abuse, dissociation, surviving gendered violence, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide all iterate. Also, a variety of metaphorical representations of the self or parts of the self appear: a grapefruit (perhaps the grapefruit), sliced bread, a grasshopper, a mongoose, hibernating bears.

But Ajar is not the chaos it might appear on the surface. Rather, it is a constructed chaos. LaPierre is an architect of verse, using the principles of visual design to inform her poetry.

I attended her workshop in the League of Canadian Poets’ Fall Poetry Intensive and LaPierre is intentional about every word and line she writes. When she discussed revision, she said she put additional lines and comments in italics throughout Ajar while editing … and left them in the final manuscript because they added meaning or context.

Evidence of this careful construction are the four cento poems included in the collection. Cento comes from Latin and means “patchwork garment.” It’s a poetic form composed of lines, phrases, or fragments borrowed from other poets and authors, collaged together to create a new, original work which recontextualizes existing literature to create new meanings, irony, or homage.

LaPierre cites the poets and their works both after each cento and in the notes, including lines from the poems by Frances Boyle, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, MA|DE, Hollay Ghadery, Liz Howard, Doyali Islam, Therese Mason Pierre, Kim Fahner, and many others.

That the four centos are “… for Psychometry,” “… for Pyrokinesis,” “… for Clairvoyance,” and “… for Immortality” is no accident, either.

Finally, to circle back to my first thoughts, Ajar as a whole is a kind of “patchwork garment,” and LaPierre recontextualizes her poetry for us with her recursions and rich metaphors and commentary.

Ajar is a collection that rewards careful study and thoughtful reading, at once harrowing and comforting.

 

 

 

 

Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in SuperCanucks, Through the Portal, and Pulp Literature. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, 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.

Forty-five Ottawa poets : Margo LaPierre : PENNY-CANDY WALK

folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets

 

 

 

medallion ultra mild king pack
bring me back the change / 

a puddle’s dilation spoke of
time, its passage. if it grew, I stopped 

to study
its oily surface & sub-marine floor, 

as a farmer considers
his growing crop 

midway through
the season. 

churches, corner stores, music halls,
pubs—the long & short walks between 

each landmark, a room
in the house of my mind. 

there, the ditch where the toad lived.
the storm drain, where loose change gathered. 

there, that brick building, its ragged clump
of vervain, goldenrod & pink clover; the bees’ orbit. 

in the giant window of the garage,
the mechanics’ blue fire. 

even satan disguises himself as an angel of light /
so, I peeped into a basement window 

& was caught, having seen nothing interesting.
people move abstractly in their homes. 

I was sorely punished—
I was just looking. 

I heard them singing, però
promise, do not tell your nonno / 

how could she believe in god’s miracle, but not
mine, to love as god does, indiscriminately? 

I live now in her house,
a duplex, a side street, 

a fatherless boy of the seventies and eighties.
I grew up surrounded by men. 

grandpa & uncles in every corner
playing rummy; listening to radio baseball; 

debating whether boxing was too sissy
an olympic sport, driveway day-drinking 

around the town car; strange brew on vhs
on the tv in nonna’s living room. 

when the devil comes, this is what it feels like /
clear liquor in a rocks glass. tongs in a paper bag. 

I traced my lover’s hip in ‘91 after the opera house.
what was he saying in that chorus? 

I said: entertain me. he said: entertain us.
yeah / what a sacrament, his lips on my mine. 

when the devil comes, this is what it feels like /
love songs, free peanuts, broken shells, inner skins 

iridescent & sailing,
discarded, to a sticky bar floor.

 

 

 

 

I’m writing a novel about love, work, and madness, set in 2012, in which the protagonist, a bisexual, bipolar tradesman who writes poetry but has never published, has a poem that ends up as a finalist in a national poetry prize. His favourite poets are Whitman, Bukowski, and Lowell, but he’s been reading Phil Hall and Don McKay. This is that poem. I wrote it, but “I” didn’t write it—James Judas Uxley did.

 

 

 

 

Margo LaPierre [photo credit: Curtis Perry] is a freelance book editor and poet. She serves on Arc’s editorial board and wrote the Writers’ Union of Canada’s guidebook on the author-editor relationship. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and a publishing certificate from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her second poetry collection is Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025).

Margo LaPierre : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Paul Vermeersch

A Valley Uncanny in NMLCT: An interview with poet Paul Vermeersch

 

Paul Vermeersch [photo credit: Bianca Spence] is a poet, multimedia artist, professor, and editor. His eighth collection of poetry, NMLCT, was published in September 2025 by ECW Press. Paul holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He is currently a professor at Sheridan College where he serves as the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.

Paul Vermeersch reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 27, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026. He is also conducting a poetry workshop as part of the festival on Saturday, March 30 [registration required; spaces still available].

Margo LaPierre: NMLCT has been called visionary, high concept, gymnastic, disorienting, and vivid. What weird thing would you compare NMLCT to? 

Paul Vermeersch: A cephalopod. I don’t know if I have an explanation for this answer. It’s the first thing I thought of. A cephalopod is complex, deliberate, stealthy, swift, fluctuating, and somehow simultaneously appealing and unsettling. Perhaps this book is, somehow, a cephalopod. 

ML: Expand on this line: “Because we did not invent the sun, we have convinced ourselves we cannot trust the light of day.” 

PV: I mean it literally. I suppose it could be read as a comment on the hubris that values human achievement over the natural world, and this book certainly explores the increasing divide between those two states of being. For myself, I want to hear a particular voice speaking this line: a voice that champions post-humanist values and is chiding us for clinging to an anthropocentric view of the universe while sarcastically praising us for inventing absurd machines… and for relying on them. 

ML: “They kept building the wrong house.” What is the right house?

PV: I have to admit that I don’t really know what the right house is. Not in the poem, anyway. I think the idea is that the right house is unknowable. It didn’t get built. Perhaps it’s not possible to build the right house. It might be so speculative, so hypothetical, that any attempt to build it would be condemned to failure. It might be equally difficult to draw a face accurately from memory as from imagination. I suppose the same can be true for a house. All I know is that the poem doesn’t know for sure, or it doesn’t want you to know. 

ML: What is the primary emotion of NMLCT? What about the secondary emotion lurking underneath, the countercurrent?

PV: In this book, I wasn’t attempting to capture any familiar feeling or recreate any known experience. I was attempting to create a new experience, one that hasn’t been felt yet. But, because we only have our “real” experiences as a frame of reference, any new experience can only be compared to what we already know, but it’s never an exact fit, and this creates something like an “uncanny valley” between what we experience and what we expect to experience. So, the primary emotion is that of a wolf that is also a cube. The secondary emotion is that of a forest that has been growing beneath the glaciers of Antarctica for millennia. There are no wolves there, but there are other animals. And birds. What is the emotion of being a cubic wolf, or a lost world inhabited by birds? We cannot know, but we experience it anyway. That. 

 

 

 

 

Margo LaPierre is a freelance book editor and poet. She serves on Arc’s editorial board and wrote the Writers’ Union of Canada’s guidebook on the author-editor relationship. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and a publishing certificate from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her second poetry collection is Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025).

Margo LaPierre : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Sandra Ridley

Bearing Witness in Vixen: An Interview with Poet Sandra Ridley

 

 

 

 

Sandra Ridley is the author of three chapbooks and five books of poetry. Vixen is her most recent collection, published by Book*hug Press in 2023.

Sandra Ridley reads in Ottawa on Saturday, March 23, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.

Margo LaPierre: You write about violence, fear, power, dread, and relentlessness with abundant care and lucidity, often in the interrogative mode. What kind of invitation do these questions extend? What questions would you like readers to ask themselves after reading Vixen?

Sandra Ridley: Thanks for asking about this. The interrogative mode is definitely purposeful.

Questioning someone (and being questioned) is felt in the body. There’s an immediate shift. And when there’s directness and clarity, there is no room to deny the meaning or its implication. In its own way, questioning holds to account the perpetrators of violence. Survivors rarely have a (safe) chance or (secure) occasion to ask anything of their hunter-stalker or violent offender. In Vixen, through direct questioning, it’s possible for the speaker to be both fiercely confrontational and assertional.

In the section titled “Thicket,” interrogations like “Does she take steps to avoid her stalker?” come from the language of law enforcement and criminal justice systems. In highlighting (or jacklighting) the notion of “victim” blaming, the questions in this section are meant to expose some of the absurd and deep-rooted biases, dogmas, judgements, and fallacies surrounding criminal harassment.

I’ve always seen the questions in Vixen acting as leg traps set to catch perpetrators (and would-be perpetrators), akin to the hunter’s snap traps that he sets for his prey. As for what I’d like readers to ask themselves? No questions. If anything, I hope that those who feel afraid, or may have ever felt afraid, will feel less alone.

ML: Did you run into any surprises or challenges while researching for Vixen?

SR: The source material on the medieval hunt, in particular the chronicles detailing fox hunting as aristocratic “chaces,” was appalling. As is the practice. It has been banned in many places, though bans are often ignored. And incredulously, fox hunting, as chase, continues to fall within the law in several countries, including the United States, Ireland, France, Australia, and Canada. These chases or field hunts have special rules. In Ontario, you can still chase red fox, raccoon, coyote, and wolf, in accordance with the province’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.

Considering the intersection of crises and the need for practices and ethics of appreciation, care and respect, it isn’t an aside to mention that Toronto and forty-two other Ontario municipalities declared gender-based, intimate partner violence an epidemic in 2023.

Each depiction of a chase that I found for “The Season of the Haunt” felt equivalent to a real-time live stream, experienced in present tense. Gathering the details from treatises and records, then needing to integrate them into the manuscript, then rereading for revisions… with each of these steps, I was disturbed for days.

Even if the language at times works as a healing balm, Vixen needed to be filled with brutality. Because that reality exists. We’re encouraged (shamed) to not to think about it or talk about it, and even more so for the ones experiencing violence.  

What could I hope for from a reader? Would the text be asking them to experience a trauma? It troubled me that I was writing a piece that even I as reader wouldn’t want to sit with. I had never understood when someone said they felt “compelled” to write something until I began this project. But there was no other way to write it.

Like a writer, a reader will do what they can with a work. This might mean a phrase isn’t read, or that a reader slips in and out of a passage or a page, or that a book is read in entirety in one sitting. A challenge for us all sometimes in life, and in what we read or write, is in how we bear witness and how we accompany a being living with unrelenting fear and pain. Whether or not we can. And if we can, for how long. 

ML: In the collection there is a list poem, “The Beasts of Simple Chace” (which appeared in an earlier version in periodicities): the gray, the vixen, the dammula, the hind, the wilkatt, the roe, the hare, the gilt, presented from the perspective of the hunter. Would you tell me a bit of what went into the making of this section—choosing and conceptualizing these hunted creatures?

SR: “The Beasts of Simple Chace” threads three elements into an arcing storyline that cuts across time—loss of language, loss of species, loss of self. I wanted this serial poem to salvage an aspect of the essential, inherent strength from each of them.

Many of the creatures in this poem were selected because of their feminized, archaic, non-extant names. And because historically many of them were killed for the thrill of blood sport or for the bragging rights of trophy hunting, as described in my sources; in particular The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting, by Edward of Norwich, Second Duke of York (1406). The features and qualities that this “hunter” had assigned to each creature were also captivating. In writing the serial opening foray, the upper tier of refrain for this poem, lines were taken from the Duke of Norwich, and torqued.

In reckoning the repetitive, age-old, and universal patterns of intimate partner violence, this serial piece also embodies the notions of part/whole, then/now, self/other, singular/plural, I/her, and individual/collective.

The serial or sequential form felt necessary for this material, so that the reader could uncover or recover the vital overlapping details, bit by bit. And like the pattern of violence, and through the stalker’s voice, it repeats.

ML: I adore these lines in “Thicket”: “And it sickens me, it does, and who wouldn’t despair? / There are some who don’t despair. I do not want to know them. I know them. / I do not want to know them.” Would you speak more on these lines, and perhaps on the value of feeling and writing uncomfortable emotions?

SR: Like any of our experiences, there is no requirement or guarantee that poetry will make us comfortable in an easy-chair way. I keep thinking about Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic by Jana Sterbak and about the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. Uncomfortable emotions (like fear, disgust, or rage) are formidable. They can be powerful inciters.

We all hope that everyone has the same moral compass, same ethics, same values, same desires for the individual or for the collective, as we ourselves do. And it’s shocking when they don’t. Or is it?

Undeniably, there are times when we feel alone, isolated, splintered off. Sometimes we are. It’s demoralizing to come to realize that people, maybe loved ones, are unable to see the suffering happening in our world—be it up close or farther afield.

It’s worse when people can’t feel it. Not feeling it lies too close to denying it.

What’s worse than that? Someone who enjoys suffering. Someone who thrives by perpetrating it.

I worry that we’re becoming numb. We are becoming numb. With Vixen, I wanted somebody to feel something. Feeling something, even if the sensation is traumatic, means we’re still alive. And if we’re feeling alive, there’s a chance we can still care and can try to try to make this life of ours better, and by that I mean our all-creature-encompassing Earth life better. The hardest part, for me and for my work, may be finding the balance between despair and hope.

I wanted to write hope and despair. Small triumph.

And yet…

The 2020 Wild Species report produced by the Government of Canada tells us that 4,883 species or 20 percent are currently at risk of extirpation, meaning that they are vulnerable, imperilled or critically imperilled. 135 species are presumed already extirpated or they are no longer found in Canada.

Also in Canada, in 2022, there were 129,876 victims of police-reported [italics mine] family violence and 117,093 victims of intimate partner violence aged twelve years and older. “The rate of family violence was more than two times higher among women and girls than among men and boys. Meanwhile, the rate of intimate partner violence was more than three times higher among women and girls than among men and boys.”

In 2023, in Ontario, there were thirty femicides in thirty weeks from November 26 to June 30, according to a report by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses. In 2022, the organization’s statistics showed fifty-two deaths in fifty-two weeks.

 

 

 

 

Margo LaPierre is a neuroqueer poet and freelance literary editor. She is Arc Poetry’s newsletter editor and a member of the poetry collective VII. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

 

Margo LaPierre : Two poems

 

 

 

Characteristics of Nonlinear Systems

The past is              an influenza fevering photos of the body.   

The past is              a flue congested, coated by the rising body.

The past is              a mysterious cold spot appearing in the body.

A rhyme is              how the past ripples through the body.

                     is how

a memory is how the past rippled through us

                    is how

 

 

 

 

Estuary

I have known myself
to worry
whether it is possible
for a mind / freshwater

to be so open
it falls right
out / brine

 

 

 

 

 

Margo LaPierre is a freelance editor and author of Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes (Guernica Editions, 2017). She serves as newsletter editor of Arc Magazine and is a member of poetry collective VII. She is the winner of the 2021 Room Poetry Contest and the 2020 subTerrain Lush Triumphant Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Arc, filling Station, CAROUSEL, PRISM, carte blanche and elsewhere. She is a Creative Writing MFA candidate at UBC. Find her on Twitter @margolapierre.