rob mclennan : 2025 Trillium Book Award shortlist interviews: Matthew Walsh

Terrarium, Matthew Walsh

icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2024

2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist 

interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2025 Trillium Book Awards will be announced on June 18, 2025.

Matthew Walsh grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in Toronto. Their poems and short stories have appeared in Joyland, the Capra Review, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, and Geist; in a chapbook entitled ICQ; and in their celebrated book-length collection These are not the potatoes of my youth, a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards. Terrarium is Walsh’s second full-length collection.

Much as your first collection, Terrarium seems very much constructed as a book-length project. Do you see your books-to-date, or your writing more broadly, in terms of projects? How do manuscripts get built?

Yes, it started out as a book-length project called Loose Future. It was called that for a long time. I started writing these really short, confined poems and the project shifted. It started getting personal and more like broken interrogations about the things I would see on the street or the internet. Then A.I. started creeping in here and there and I just had this idea of all these broken little glimpses of a person’s life. I looked for the bizarre and the Wonder Bread truck. Most of this book is inspired by my self induced isolations and things I’ve overheard or seen in real life, or these very vivid dreams I was having, past failed relationship, what we know and don’t know, failures and the little tiny victories that can be as simple as a rat dragging away a paper plate.

Was “Loose Future” always a placeholder title, or was it more a matter of the book moving beyond it, and towards something else?

Loose Future could have been the title but I started writing these more 14 line poems, like sonnets or sonnet-like. And I began to think of confinements. How we can be trapped in these repetitive cycles or how we have to contain ourselves. And my friend was making terrariums at the time and I kept thinking of being able to see things or to desire something but there is some barrier in the way of you achieving a goal or wanting to be desired and to desire something that is sometimes right in front of you but you can’t get it it. So the book became Terrarium some time after that.

What brought about your fondness for the sonnet? What do you feel the sonnet allows that might not be possible through other forms?

I didn’t adhere specifically to the sonnet form totally and completely, but I wanted the poems or the majority of them to be terse, short and sweet. There are some longer poems but for the most part I tried to stick to a 14 line rule. I like the history of the sonnet and the constraint that it comes with it. I wanted the poems to feel broken or confined in some way to their weird perspectives and world.

How did this book feel different from what you were attempting in your debut? Following a debut can often be tricky, especially with the positive attention yours received. Was there anything you were attempting to move away from or towards with the poems in your second?

Some poets keep doing the same thing or a variation on themes that work for them. I feel like there are some similarities. I love to break lines in unexpected ways to create surprises or tension. Each line I want to feel like the reader is on a cliff or something like that, to keep the excitement and energies. I tried not to mention a single potato or have the poems be specifically about me. I think I managed to make it about the environment the speaker inhabits and the world they are seeing and still have it be personal and also about what is going on in the bigger world with art, A.I. , and capitalism. I wanted the book to feel varied and different and more cerebral and sly.

When I asked about what drew you to poetry over any other particular form back in 2019, as part of your “12 or 20 questions” interview, you answered: “I just like fragments.” Does that still hold? And after two published poetry collections, has your relationship with the fragment changed or evolved?

Most of my poems are inspired by the pieces I see throughout a day. It could be the last on the subway with a bunch of dollar store flowers in her hair or a pigeon in the middle of the road. I tried to get meaning out of these subtle little moments and tried to give them more weight. I like to go and eavesdrop or catch little snippets of conversations, and try to make poems out of those fragments as well. Most of my stuff starts with pieces or a turn of phrase I try to turn into something else, if that makes sense.

I’m curious about your relationship to form. Beyond the sonnets in this particular collection, have you a potential shape in mind when you begin to compose? Are there particular structures in the back of your head, or is the process more intuitive, formed through the process of composition?

I just have these unconventional ideas about form. I would say they are “sonnets” or “gonnets” not sonnets. I wanted to keep the book clipped and have short poems with a few longer ones thrown in. I wanted the collection to feel fractured and vulnerable. Some of the poems black out on themselves. I just wanted to use the collection to experiment and play. Everyone was saying the second collection is the hardest so I internalized that and was really hard on myself. I made up words. I listened to what was happening around me. The Cocteau Twins are mentioned because a lot if not all of their songs have no real words, and just evoke a feeling or a memory through their use of no words. A lot of the collection is about avoiding the real problem. I love to use a fixed form to get started and I thought the sonnet was the best fit for me this time around. My first book had a lot of long lines and was because it was travelling across Canada in a Greyhound bus. This was more of a fixed place for Terrarium. There is a brief detour with an ex boyfriend to Los Angeles. Otherwise picture me in Toronto walking around and looking at all the things that aren’t there anymore.

You almost make it sound as though Terrarium is a book populated by ghosts. Is Terrarium a book populated by ghosts?

I don’t think there is a single ghost in this book! It’s about things that aren’t there, lost time, dreams, failures, little successes. The book mentions a few book stores and Toronto locations that aren’t there anymore, for instance, and things that are ephemeral. Eliot’s Books is gone, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library is gone, for instance. Not to be grim, but what lasts? I just kept thinking about that.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Terrarium was completed? What have you been working on since?

I just finished a chap book collab with someone, so we each wrote ten short poems for that project. I have four poems for one project that I’m slowly working on and I have about 14 poems for this new poetry book that has a bit of steam behind it and I’m excited for that one. I’m going to the middle of nowhere in July for ten days to live in a trailer so I’m hoping to finish at least a solid draft of that poem. The town is between two ghost towns. It’s about working minimum wage jobs and capitalism and silent reading and making art. I found this quote from Clarice Lispector I have in the back of my mind for inspiration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s latest, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, October 2025), is already up for pre-order. Do you need to know anything else?

 

Kim Fahner : Terrarium, by Matthew Walsh

Terrarium, Matthew Walsh
Goose Lane / Ice House, 2024

 

 

 

When I heard that Matthew Walsh was publishing a new collection of poetry—because I follow them on Instagram—I was excited. I so loved These are not the potatoes of my youth (Ice House, 2019), as well as ICQ (Anstruther, 2021), so I was keen to read Walsh’s newest book, Terrarium (Ice House, 2024). Walsh’s work is vibrant in the way they see and interpret the world around them. Poems are filled with sharp and specific imagery: there’s a man with a “crucifix tattoo on his head,” spider egg sacs in a kitchen window “are like a small newly discovered solar system,” a man who carries towels “like he found a cloud/and must return it to somewhere,” and a speaker who is “sitting in the bathtub in the dark/listening to the onomatopoeia of water.” Walsh is very good at making metaphors sparkle, so that they rise off the page into a reader’s mind and imagination in innovative ways. The wait for this new full book of Matthew Walsh poems has—in my estimation as a poet and keen reader of Canadian poetry—been well worth it.

The title of the book makes the reader think: terrariums are enclosed spaces made of glass, tiny ecosystems where a person can observe what’s happening inside with plants and (sometimes) tiny creatures. They’re a bit like aquariums for plants rather than fish, if you need a visual in your mind. The more extended metaphor, though, is that a terrarium could be compared to a global, national, local, or even personal ‘ecosystem.’ We are inside the ‘globe’ of the world—millions of us—but we seem to be more and more isolated than ever despite the Internet, all of us striving for personal connection, while trying to figure out who we are as we go on living in these strange times. 

In Terrarium, as in Walsh’s chapbook, ICQ, the speaker in the poems is longing for connection in a time when everyone is so connected by the Internet but is somehow still not able to find it. It’s a bit like Sisyphus continually rolling that boulder up a hill into eternity in terms of how empty virtual ‘connectivity’ can seem. There are temporary fixes to this strange and surreal sense of being alone in a virtually driven world—of swiping left and right in a mad frenzy, and of an increase in substance addiction. Depression, too, figures into the equation, often a result of increased isolation. The lure of instant gratification doesn’t fill the void, either. In “Mr. Snuffleupagus,” Walsh reflects on the invisibility of Snuffy. Adults have never seen (or maybe just refuse to believe in) Mr. Snuffleupagus at all; they don’t have faith in the truth of it all. Things are not always what they seem on the superficial surface of our existence, and Walsh draws our attention to this truth in their work.  

In “Reality,” the speaker eavesdrops to overhear a worrisome conversation between “two girls heading east” on the subway, only to discover that “their concern was intimate/info about a Los Angeles TV family.” Walsh speaks of this surreal observation on human behaviour as “knowledge that defines the contemporary/world for some unseen reason.” The discordance that exists between what we see or hear on the surface these days, and what we feel in our hearts, minds, and physical bodies, is large and sometimes overwhelming. Walsh extends this exploration of (dis)connection while thinking about the way in which artificial intelligence has also woven itself so incestuously into the world in poems like “Skeleton” and “Gatorade.” In “Skeleton,” the speaker ponders philosophically: “I don’t mention artificial intelligence/sitting in a chair that does not exist/I just wonder if are more things AI than not AI/should be the new to be or not to be.” Again, the theme that nothing is as it once was is clearly conveyed in Terrarium.

Walsh documents their search for personal identity in a truthful and revealing confessional manner. The speaker in “Moonstone,” kisses “a mechanic/in front of several mirrors/inside True Centre Muffler and Care/and it is similar to therapy,” so that the reader feels a bit voyeuristic. In “Crab,” the speaker ponders their identity after their email provider asks whether they are human or not, “something not easily done/for as a queer it can take a lot/to convince the people in power/I have the same organs and teeth/and even I’m conflicted.” In “Shelter,” the speaker says, “I’m very sick of my own skeleton,” plans “to be fed to a tree/when released of this Matthew body/so some part of me can be/ a shelter for the living/thing staggering from the highway.” In “Soft Core,” Walsh writes: “I wish I could have let it be known/that I was queer earlier in my memory/without the years of anguish/and duplicity.” In “Zoom,” the poet’s quirky sense of humour is embodied in the lines “I would have/loved to have stayed but this Christmas/party could have been an email,” underling their keen sense of irony, observation, and poetic documentation.

Throughout Terrarium, there are echoes of specific images and phrases. There are repeated references to 3 a.m. transit rides home after a shift at work finishes, a turquoise bench “waiting for a connection on the Yonge Line,” a pomegranate, mirrors, water, dreams, night skies, and Tarot symbology. All this repetition of specific images ripples back through the poems in a metacognitive fashion. The poet fashions poems that don’t allow the reader to laze about, keeps tossing pebbles into the pond and asks readers to follow the ripples to see where they might meet a shoreline. The 3 a.m. observer takes note of tiny things like birds that are “still/silhouettes on the power line,” “a man on a ladder throwing fedoras out/a second-floor window into a dumpster,” “going skinny dipping in the Pacific” on a trip to California, and even finds Neptune as a focus point in the night sky.

What’s really beautiful about Terrarium is its confessional tone, its pure and unabashed honesty. The speaker tells the truth as they see it, and the observations become well-crafted images and metaphors. Any poet knows that this is the part that takes hard work, time, and great care. In the tiniest of spiders that manoeuvres across “some invisible silk “across a bedroom, Walsh suggests, we might realize that “human eyes aren’t meant to understand/or see all threads and connections.” Perhaps what Walsh most importantly calls their readers to consider, after reading the poems of Terrarium—in a kind of Yeatsian way—is how we all try to define ourselves, connect with others, and try to find some meaning in a world that so often feels without a centre. 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : ICQ, by Matthew Walsh

ICQ, Matthew Walsh
Anstruther, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Walsh’s new chapbook, ICQ, is another Anstruther beauty. I’m more and more fond of chapbooks these days because they feel more intimate to me, as if you’ve been invited into the poet’s mind and heart. This is the case with ICQ. There are just twelve poems, so you feel gathered in and confided in. Walsh uses elegant couplets throughout the collection. Swimming the other morning, in a Northern Ontario lake, I saw a couple of loons in flight. I felt that their flight, as a pair, was a bit like Walsh’s use of couplets as a set form in ICQ—so elegant and graceful on the white space of the page, an almost visual respite in a challenging pandemic year.

I need to admit that I’m a fierce fan of Walsh’s poetry, and that I really loved These are not the potatoes of my youth. Like that book, this one is also confessional in tone. ICQ is about trying to find out who you are, where and when you can safely be yourself, and how we all seek a path to walk through this life. The poem that opens the chapbook is “Mystery,” a piece that speaks to the complexity of romantic relationships. Here, a boyfriend “has no ears” to listen when the speaker tries “to explain/the verb of my own heart.” There it is—that quickly and deftly turned Walsh line that pierces you when you least expect it while reading. In “Ellipses,” Walsh writes of how religion harms self-expression, especially in terms of sexuality. They write: “it was as if talk of the human//body was denied due to internal error or the mixture/of Catholicism and shame in knowing you genuflect//in a building to worship a man who lives in the sky.”

Someone’s need to hide their true identity, because of society’s ridiculous and archaic hang ups with sex, is further explored in “Soft Core,” when Walsh writes “I had never seen this before, the moment my desires/were on screen like this” and “my mistake was accepting opinion of others/to be true when the only true thing is I am living.” Further, they write: “I wish I could have let it be known/that I was queer earlier in my memory.” Then, in “Iamb,” the quiet moment of certain realization is written down: “I realized that I found my people much later in life/and that I can make choices for myself.” These journeys that we go on take up so much of our lives, and we keep evolving as we go, even if there is a great deal of pain in the middle of the growth spurts that we encounter.

The world of cell phones and social media—along with the duelling notions of human isolation and connectivity—plays a key role in ICQ, which is internet language for “I seek you.” Internet dating is common now, and people are tethered to their phones in a way that has only increased in recent years. In “Desire,” during sex, the speaker says, “like the internet I open window/after window after window.” In “Pea Cloud,” auto-correct in a text message changes “I think I am working through/Mon-Thurs to I am ethereal,” further underlining the way in which we confuse ourselves with the way we speak, write, and communicate with one another. In “Mystery,” again, Walsh ponders: “It’s weird to think humans created language/yet we can’t speak to each other—it’s like texting.” We lose and then re-make meaning in new ways when we communicate through electronic devices, perhaps more often muddying the water of meaning than we can ever really know.

Deep undercurrents of beauty run through ICQ when Walsh conjures up “a perfectly laid out deer/skeleton near dark,” a “world where you can’t tell ocean from sky,” and “if my body was dot dot dot it was punctuation, ellipses.” In “Desire,” they write of “spring blossoms in the air, Alexander Keith’s, white moths/catching moonlight while he ate the apple off the knife.” In “Pea Cloud,” there is “an affinity to rise from the ocean//feeling like I was born, made of sea foam, cloud.” Walsh has a way with images, so that a sunrise after a night of lovemaking is remembered vividly as “this baby/blue, then pink” seeping “out from what was the pupil//of the sky over Lake Ontario.” Their work is stunning and fresh at every turn of line, couplet, and page.

While this chapbook contains just twelve poems, Matthew Walsh’s ICQ is honest, poignant, and feels substantial in the themes it addresses. Reading it just makes a person wish that the next full- length collection was already here. This is a chapbook that will hopefully lead to more work. For me, as a keen reader of poetry, that time can’t come quickly enough.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Khashayar Mohammadi : These are not the potatoes of my youth, by Matthew Walsh

These are not the potatoes of my youth, Matthew Walsh

Goose Lane Editions, 2019

In Matthew Walsh’s brilliant debut collection, the reader can sit on the other side of his confessional booth and listen to nostalgic city-portraits intercut with potato farming! Walsh’s incisive wit dissects family dynamics while trying to reconcile their lineage of farming with inner desires unfamiliar to the Canadian countryside.

My father comes from people who learned to talk

the potato into growing more potatoes

to reconcile:

I think my dad liked me because he didn’t know what I wanted was to be

Pamela Anderson in the red bathing suit, circa Baywatch theme song credits

The importance of place is expressed through queering geographies, a fresh re-framing of Canada viewed through a kaleidoscope of travelogues. Walsh’s writing approaches the superstice of everyday living with relentless awe and surprise and disintegrates it into absurdity. Chaotic comedy persists through the darkest moments and shines as a beacon of maturity at the face of adversity.

I had interior-decorated poems with metaphors hanging

all over them, was told simply by straight peers ‘stick to the fluffy

topics’ Like Drag Brunch recaps, or?

They portray the rural Canadian family as nurturers who can bring barren soil to flower; farmers for whom the land represents an endless cycle of life and death. The rural Canadian farmer as rural Canadian parent, natural growers who use their agricultural skills to raise children.

Walsh rediscovers the stasis of nostalgia through restless kinesis of his words that beautifully parallel his movement through cities, landscapes and imagery. Each page of These are not the potatoes of my youth is simultaneously a love letter and a break-up poem to cities across Canada. Walsh shows their admiration without dependence, their love without obsession, their lust without artifice. Multiple portrayals of friends and friendships pepper the manuscript, short silhouettes of all those who wove themselves into this colorful tapestry of cityscapes and fleeting skylines. This book is a loving ode to all who stuck by us in dark times, those who helped us and those whom we helped.

I took pictures of her black eye with a Konica camera

so the police would finally see

her partner. She would grab my throat

to feel my lymph nodes when she lived

with us and read them, trying to figure out who I was

in a past life.

In their wonderful debut, Walsh is constantly rediscovering the self in different landscapes, exploring the self in relation to the environment. Walsh redefines character based on surroundings and grounds experiences to the past through cultural touchstones. They delicately balance the bitter with the sweet and laughable. Poems flow with inertia, and the reader is carried further into the story even after the last line of a poem is uttered.

and this is my animal pose, this is the look for me, it’s animal

and I ask what is up do you have a manual on how to behave

and I am all fours, asking not to be or not be. But--

I can be this poem. I can be wilderness.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator.