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?

 

rob mclennan : 2025 Trillium Book Award shortlist interviews: Jake Byrne

DADDY, Jake Byrne
Brick Books, 2024
2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

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

Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2’s Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.

Much as your first collection, DADDY 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?

I think books in Canada are more likely to thrive in the ‘project’ format primarily because the provincial and federal granting systems, which keep the ecosystem running, reward applications – and therefore books – that have a clearly defined narrative project. It is the same way that grant applications for books that are, say, two-thirds finished already are more likely to succeed, if only because the author can describe their project with that much more specificity and clarity near the finish line versus from the starting line.

If you look at books published in the U.S., there are fewer ‘project’ books, and books tend to be eclectic compilations of very polished (arguably very safe) work, because the competition is so intense that it is contest juries that shape what gets published down there.

But this is a long way to say that I still think it depends on the book.

You describe DADDY as a book-length project like my first book, but from my perspective, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin had a concept but no actual project until the second last round of editing, when it finally came together. I hated that book until two months before publication because I felt it did not live up to the idea I had for it, which was vague and ill-defined until the last minute.

To me, Celebrate Pride is a more classical ‘first book’ in that there are a bunch of poems in there that were not written for the book – tons of poems I wrote for school that I no longer liked but didn’t want to throw out either, formal experiments, trying on other writers’ voices, using personae, characters, all sorts of games and tricks.

DADDY was written as a project, and the project was to finally start writing poems about my relationship with my dad – poems about my other two parents followed shortly thereafter, and then the second half came as a joyful consequence out of the self-discovery I was doing in the first half. (There’s actually a third section that got cut because the book ballooned, and I wanted to keep this one lean. As lean as a maximalist can manage, anyway.)

I didn’t really think my story was worth telling, but I had been taught to think that my childhood was normal or even good, and I have since realized it was not.

The first poem in the book – “Parallel Volumes” – describes the thought process and genesis of the entire book. I felt I had been protecting my family by not writing about them. Readers can smell insincerity, though. The words don’t connect when you’ve filtered them through several layers of abstraction. Then I realized if I didn’t tell this story I was going to, on some level or another, die. Probably not literally, but there was going to be a big betrayal of my soul there, and that was not going to be good for me or my art.

That said, I listened to a few concept albums at a critical point in my teenage years, and that kind of ensured I’ll be doing the concept album thing forever, for better or worse.

What a long way to say it depends! But it’s true. The job of the artist is to figure out how to build the idiomatic better mousetrap, and the finished product will probably look like a mousetrap even if the internal process that led there was very different.

Curious. I’ve long considered the book as cohesive unit to be an extension, partly, of the west coast poetics (the Talonbooks/Coach House axis) of the long poem across the 1960s and 70s. I recall a complaint by one of them during that period, George Bowering, perhaps, of Irving Layton poetry books, how they were all completely the same: once enough poems in the pile, it became a book, and then onto the next pile. Through all of that, is your preference, then, to compose poems as they come, and worry about the shape of how they might fit into a full-length manuscript once you’ve enough to consider?

Well, I'm about to out myself as a dunce, but I have virtually zero education in the Talonbooks/Coach House axis of the 1960s and 1970s; my long poem comes from the Modernists.

More to read, I suppose. And yes – poems as they come, and the structure to fit them into after. I think poetry must have a somewhat spontaneous element to its composition.

If I were capable of writing book-length projects as planned and sequentially, I’d be a novelist – there’s more money in it.

I came to this art form mostly because my undiagnosed ADHD made it difficult to stick to the disciplines that required many hours of consistent practice. Poetry you still practice, but over long periods of spontaneous composition. There is a finite number of poems you can write in a day – and that number is three.

Oh, hardly a dunce: I think each of our different experiences through reading provides us different elements of information, including what to read and even how to read. Your answer made me wonder if I’m too often too comfortable within a set of held facts (new information to reframe and reshape is the key, I suppose). And we’ve spoken before about ADHD, and our different avenues there, also. Do you find a difficulty with completing projects, or even working on one project at a time?

Absolutely to both. The last 10-20% of any project is the worst for me, and I always have about four book ideas on the back burner.

People with ADHD are said to abandon things once they get past the point of proficiency, when there isn't the immediate feedback of ‘difficulty’ to keep the brain engaged.

And as a testament to that, I have about 70 video games in my collection played to the two-thirds mark and then cheerfully abandoned.

This is less cheerful a phenomenon when applied to vocations or relationships.

I think writers with ADHD should focus their thoughts on publishing during the last third of working any manuscript, to be aware that that the true difficulty of any writing project, in fact, might lay elsewhere. Given that, what loose strands have you been focusing on since DADDY was completed? And might that excised “third section” of DADDY ever see the light of day?

I hate to report this, but I have done zero literary work since editing DADDY. Zero grant applications. Haven’t even attempted to fix my busted literary website. Maybe wrote thirty poems in the last two years.

Life has been all maintenance work: resting, meditating, couples counseling/therapy, physiotherapy. Boring, necessary things. I'm proud of DADDY but publishing it came with a pretty serious cost to my family relationships.

That third section will be published eventually, but it’s about a – corniness warning – “spiritual journey,” and it feels a bit presumptive to publish on that subject.

It might be a while before I publish another book. I dunno. Ask me again in two years.

It sounds as though you are doing exactly what you need to be doing, and that’s a good thing. We can’t get to anything else until that stuff is properly covered. And thirty poems across two years is a lot for some writers, so I think you’re still fine. Separately, and this might seem like a foolish question, but has the Trillium nomination added or changed any of how you see the book, or your work generally?

I wouldn’t say it has changed it, but it’s definitely provided a little spark of hope. It’s silly – I want my practice to be immune to prize culture, but my ego is obviously not. The external validation is helpful, especially in light of my family estrangement. And it’s always humbling to be recognized by your peers.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a newchapbook is out now via Ethel Zine (but you already know that). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.