rob mclennan : Lantern, by Sanna Wani

Lantern, Sanna Wani
Anansi, 2026

 

 

 

The second full-length poetry title by Sanna Wani, following My Grief, the Sun (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2022), is Lantern (House of Anansi, 2026), a collection that self-describes as “Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s Lantern explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood?” Structured into cluster-sections of lyrics—“CRAFT,” “LOVE,” “ETHOS,” “FAITH” and “GRIEF”—Wani articulates moments around entering and settling into adulthood, from childhood memory and parents, relationships and responsibilities to community, responsibilities to those one has lost and to memory itself. “There are things that keep us sane,” she writes, to open the short prose poem “SAFETY BLANKET,” “and things that don’t. For / me, it’s a blanket as old as I am. What keeps us alive, / keeps us alive.” These are poems about settling into a space and looking around, both forward and back, and within the present moment. Assessing where one is, and where one has been. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my Nana lately.” begins the opening prose poem, “SEPTEMBER 26, 2020,” articulating a narrative around memory and loss. A bit further on in the same poem, writing: “What would he make of my work? I wish I / could talk to him. He is my work now. There is nothing I write that is not / his.”

There is an interesting way that Wani’s poems seek clarity, as well as clarification, attempting details from recalled events, occasionally caught in the weeds of her own memory, and questioning what she might previously have been unaware. There is a gentle sense of urgency on where she is now and how she got here, and the sense that she needs to reevaluate, whether for city living, adult responsibilities or what memory might hold. “Consider the kiln the clay will soon / enter,” she writes, as part of the poem “POTTERY CLASS ON DUNDAS STREET,” “its chances to crack or explode. / Consider explosions part of the process.” One could say that the lantern itself is used to light one’s way, to illuminate what otherwise would be only dark, and here she is, attempting exactly that, across a sequence of first-person narrative stretches that meditate and question as much as they reveal. At times, Wani’s details seem to hold to the abstract for dear life, offering a slippage from the concrete to the metaphysical, or allowing a stitch of the sentimental a thread, such as the poem “WINTER STORM,” that includes:

Recently, I tried to write a poem that started with, When it snows / the whole
world is in love. Sometimes I confuse love with silence. Stillness. I’ve been
reading up on comfort and chaos. I like missing you. I like watching the
day kiss the ground. If you were here, you would tell me some fact about the
history of snow or how it isn’t really white.

I will admit I reacted, slightly, to the line “I use language’s tricks when I have nothing else to say.” from the poem “THE BEER STORE,” fully aware of how much a line such as this highlights Wani’s approach to these poems, far different from my own (through which those explorations through language are entirely the point). Although, while still working her point-driven lyric narratives, Wani’s directions wander in curious ways, offering a softer sense of narrative sharpness, of egress and build-up, allowing the question of where certain poems might actually end up. She offers such delicate surprise, articulating moments, held in the hand; composing notes on moments between moments, across lines not carved in stone but gently crafted. She writes of ethics amid grief, cultural inheritance and loss, including echoes of Partition, and the need for clear-eyed resoluteness during periods of upheaval. “What use is reverence in catastrophe?” she asks, for example, as part of the poem “LULLABY FOR GAZA.” I appreciate how Wani articulates through poems questions around what it is she should be doing, what poems could or should do, or even what can be done at all. It is said that our purpose on this earth is to find our purpose, and these poems work through some heavy questions of what precisely her purpose, both through and beyond the shape and scale of writing, should be. What use, then, poems? And her answers, as she finds them, not set as forever, but in those very moments, allowing for the evolution of her own thinking to progress, as it requires. A few lines further, in the same piece, as she provides: “We can’t give up. My job is to tell you about the light, [.]”

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is a person, place or thing. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), is currently up for the Archibald Lampman Award, which might be his seventh time up for this particular award, making him, most likely, the Diane Warren of the Archibald Lampman Award.

rob mclennan : Pulse, by Maria Nazos

Pulse, Maria Nazos
Omnidawn Publishing, 2026

 

 

 

The latest from American poet and translator Maria Nazos, and the first I’ve seen of her work, is the poetry collection Pulse (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2026), a suite of sharp, pinpoint first-person lyric articulations around gesture, meditative flailing, swirling reflection and passionate resolve. She writes through elegy and grace on where she’s been, what she’s seen, and how she got there, and how, against all odds, she possibly got back. “Today, we’ll wake up again and drink pineapple juice / spiked with Bacardi,” she writes, to open the poem “Expatriate’s Pantoum,” “then curl up in a hammock. / We’ll do another line, then you’ll play me more Bruce, / then we’ll cash another unemployment check.” Her author biography includes an array of experience, much of which is referenced throughout this collection: “Maria has worked almost every job imaginable, including as a whale watch boat attendant, table dancer, barista, sunglass salesperson, bartender, and probably the worst waitress in the entire history of the Eastern seaboard. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she apologizes.” These poems are gestural, but not performative, relaying stories as they occurred, and as surprised as you are, seemingly, that she made it through, although her fortitude and resolve are certainly evident.

Each poem is the result of a layered thickness, with so much packed in, writing on maturity, lost loves and errant youth, abuse and self-abuse. “Need to come home to a man with grease on his hands / who will feel my quiet regret.” closes the short poem “Designer’s Remorse,” “Until the flowers tremble so hard in their water. And the crystal / in the finest of lenses breaks.” Nazos offers moments of witness, of clarity and empathy, including for those that might never otherwise find it. “Everything falls across the sea.” she writes, as part of “Waitress in a Small-Town Seaside Tavern,” “She lowers the lights; now the bar’s dark too, / she brings us another round of whiskeys. / Now her bruise looks less black, more blue, // with the lights lowered—the bar’s dark too— / so we can hardly see the mark, / her bruse looks less black and more blue.” Through a subtle adherence to rhythms, poetic form and the occasional rhyme, there are narrative lyric trails here almost comparable to the lyric of Saskatchewan poet Karen Solie, as Nazos’ wayward trails derail a bit more wild, less calm remove, writing joy and pulse and loss at a far different, even propulsive, speed. Reflecting on and referencing a working class sequence of shitty jobs, lost opportunities and questionable decisions, Nazos writes of passion, heartbreak and as often, a lack of opportunity. Just as much, these are poems on agency and survival, the thread that ties them all together. As the opening poem, “Ars Poetica,” begins:

Is it not enough to write about the empty bottles, any more
than the space between them? not enough to write 

about the gritty underside of the barroom table, how easily I slid
(like the mind slides in the early morning), in and out 

of strangers’ beds. But when did poetry dictate that it’s not enough
to write about the man I love pressed against me in bed, 

sticky as rock candy after his work? since when did I tell myself
That I couldn’t write about the scattered lights 

in New York, or about when I stood at the lip of a cliff overlooking
Delphi, while the ground beneath me hummed?

 

 

 

rob mclennan is a person, place or thing. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), is currently up for the Archibald Lampman Award, which might be his seventh time up for this particular award, making him, most likely, the Diane Warren of the Archibald Lampman Award.

Chris Stroffolino : A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, by Joshua Beckman

A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, Joshua Beckman
Wave Books, 2026

 

At the end of A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries (Wave, 2026), Joshua Beckman writes:

“A few years ago, I was teaching a remote introduction to poetry for my mother and her friend Marcia. For a class on Dorothy Wordsworth, I had each of them keep a diary. The following week we were to read Sappho, and I wanted some way of introducing them to the literary fragment, so I created a handful of suggestions they could follow. To make their own fragments from the diaries they kept. One day a friend who had been reading through her diaries came by for a visit and said she could use a hundred of these suggestions, so I made the guide included here….

(Notes and acknowledgments, 67)

The eponymous Guide appears from pages 55-65 of the book, and includes such suggestions as:

“Any page, up four lines from the bottom, begin writing until first full sentence ends.

Any page, last two lines.

Any page, first verb to second verb.

Transcribe the next parenthetical encountered.

Write out the next three questions encountered….” (61)

The bulk of this book, however, features 18 of Beckman’s own poems, or perhaps we may call them literary fragments, though they often have more in common with the list poem than the sapphic fragment. Up until this point in the book, the reader may assume that Beckman himself made these poems using some of the guide he concocted for his mother, or at the very least from his own diaries. Such an assumption, however, becomes refuted as his notes continue:

“At the beginning of the book you will find a variety of poems written in different forms, and while none of them were made using the guide, many come out of similar formal experiments.”

So, in a sense the title of the book does not accurately describe over 80% of the book’s contents, but “trick ending” aside, the collections of poems included is great in their formal, genre-bending, achievement, as the book builds to increasing complexity and intensity culminating with “the record of reoccurring thought” or “today,” depending on whether you prefer the title in the t.o.c. (which is more descriptive)  to the title on the poem ‘proper’ (52-53).  Early in the book, the third piece, “A. Said” (aka “advice recorded,”) consists of one-word lines that out Creeley-Creeley in compelling vertical---rather than horizontal-- attention, weaving contrasting characters into an anti-plot narrative that is beautifully sustained for 15 pages, creating a believable social fabric distilled to a deep psychological essence, precisely because it is stripped of context. While “van ride to jfk” (which gains more weight if we consider its alternate title, “things seen on a first trip out, may 2022”) is an observational list poem, “The Great Good Fortune of a Dreamer” is more rhetorically epideictic, with each line beginning with the phrase “I love how in dreams.”

Immediately after this poem appears, a list of questions (aka “stillness skills,” 30) appear as a transitional piece between the dream poem and “Body Questions” (31-32) The one page lyric on page 33 (aka ‘first yoga poem”) features the verb “bows” metamorphizing to the noun “bow” while the poem on page 34 emphasizes the “bowl” like qualities of the body, as if to answer the body questions. Then follows a beautiful tender lyric tribute to a master of beautiful lyric tributes, David Shapiro. Reading this four-stanza poem, which begins:

            David Shapiro

            closes himself up

in a violin case and sleeps

like a Russian baby

The End

And ends with:

            And inside that, his poem

            And inside that, his voice

            And inside that, his joy

            which immediately escapes

            into the world’s air

            playing as it goes [,]

            

I do become very curious how it may have had its genesis in aa diary. The theme of “joys” continues in the next list poem, the 5 page “some joys (requested by friends)” which moves from simple perceptual joys like “Hold me Tight by Johnny Nash” (which itself reminds me of the David Shapiro poem with the repeated use of the line “When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy ledge”) on 36 and “Lake ice/ Lake ice sound” on 38 to more complex subjective  joys on page 39 as:

            “New interpersonal knowledge finding its way through the failing body

            The private desire to bring someone hurting joy, manifest in their laughing.”

 

This book also includes “The Portrait (a transcription of what my mother said while painting my portrait the last few minutes of four different sittings),” a 7 page piece in which Beckman lovingly inverts the artist/model relationship in perhaps the most narrative piece in the book. While it may be relatively easy to imagine the roots of “Early 1984” in a diary entry, by the time we get to the collection’s final poem, “Today,” it is much more difficult to imagine it has its origin in a diary. though it shares the cadences of the list poem with most of the work in this book, “Today” complicates it by alternating lines starting with “Last night” with lines starting with “Today.” Yet, once again, the poem does not click shut like a box, but, rather, leaves an opening in the final five lines:

            “Today summerless

            Today light

            Today with cracked tooth

            Today okay too late

            Tonight to not be there.”

 

 

 

Chris Stroffolino has published 9 solo collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (Blaze Vox, 2025); he’s also published a poetic collaboration with Steve Carll, Dreaming to a Click (2026, Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, Periodicities published his short essays on Virginia Konchan and Rae Armantrout; poems are forthcoming in Hanging Loose and New American Writing. He lives in Oakland, CA. where he taught at Laney College from 2008 until February 2025, when he suffered a stroke.

Kim Fahner : The Garbage Poems, by Anna Swanson

The Garbage Poems, Anna Swanson
Brick Books, 2025

 

 

 

As a fellow lake swimmer, it seems fitting that I must openly admit my bias for eagerly entering a wide variety of lakes and rivers in Northern Ontario each summer before I even begin to review Anna Swanson’s The Garbage Poems.

Swanson begins with recognizing the stress that climate crisis—and climate grief—can have on a person in the first poem in the book, “I Am Writing a Spell for Your Nervous System.” The spell is being hidden “in a poem.” All is made clear for the reader in the first few couplets of this piece. The speaker lists the things that cause them stress: “Another heatwave, hurricane. Grief//gurgles like a sump pump./The Arctic on fire. Thirsty birds//of industry, mouthing/dry wells” are noted, followed by “Bulldozers//in the olive grove. Prehensile/suits in a sealed building,//deciding who deserves/to be a person.” As Swanson writes later in the collection, in a section titled “Some Definitions,” a  “spell” may be defined as “Poetry as incantation, as speech act, as linguistic battery, as asynchronous co-regulation, as jam jars put up for the long winter.” Here, the poet equates poetry with magic, alongside swimming and its transformative powers.

For the poet, the noise of the greedy corporate world causes nerves to be “clenched/shut like barnacles.” A road out of the city leads to a place to swim, where the speaker steps out “of the idea of clothes,//into a shallow dive.” The escape and respite of the pond swim means that they can enter the world again afterward, “begin again” in the face of a dark world.

What’s unique about The Garbage Poems is that all of them—except for three—are composed of found text. These are found poems that sing loudly, calling readers to pay attention to the poems themselves, but also inviting them to engage with April White’s beautiful illustrations. Each illustration is paired with a poem, and each poem reflects the piece of rubbish that is visible in White’s drawings. There’s a lovely balance here—of finding visual and poetic art in what has been cast off without thought near all the swimming spots that Swanson visits and records. The words—the poetry—come from the cast-off pieces of  garbage. (Only the titles of the poems are not tied to refuse.) Even in times of climate crisis, making art is key and this art comes from what’s been trashed. This transformative creativity is part of what makes The Garbage Poems even more timely and powerful. It leaves readers thinking “How can we shift crisis into creativity?” and “How can we use art and poetry to remind us that we can’t give up?”  

Throughout the collection, the natural elements consistently serve as doorways from one dimension into another. In “Portals,” the speaker informs the reader that there is “A hum at the edge//of a formal garden/that called to us, sparked” and that, in passing through it into parallel universes, they “dive towards the perfect//doorway of my outline,/the rippling of a beaded curtain//about to part.” In closing, the speaker says, “Now I surface, wet with crossing.” The more a swimmer enters water, is physically released from the confines of gravitational forces and can float freely and without tether, the clearer their voice seems to get.

In the poem, “In Which Skinny-Dipping Restores a Voice,” the speaker speaks to a swimmer who searches for something that cannot be found on land, where they can only find comfort in total submersion: “Make cold contact./Your face, your ribs. Your assembled//damage & cravings. Stay under./Lose your left & your right. Lose your receipts//& your schedules & your adhesive/outline.” Upon surfacing and taking a breath, the speaker encourages the swimmer to “Speak now like a child who is//also an alligator” while also speaking “the apples/of your green-bodied attention” and reminds them to “Speak hot & necessary like calories,//like antibodies./Like fire.” Through this earthy (and watery) baptism by means of swimming, the swimmer comes into themselves fully.

Physicality, chronic illness, and nervous system regulation are present in The Garbage Poems, too. Body-based reflections and observations are central to the poems. Concussions cause worry and the speaker finds comfort in swimming. In one of the “Some Definitions” sections that spread out in the book, nervous system regulation is reflected upon: “In the water, my nerves finally stop multi-tasking. None of them are afraid…Each nerve registers the same smooth touch of the water. They are in agreement. There is no chatter, no emergency council. Slowly, my nerves open like barnacles, reaching their slight sightless fronds out into the living water.” In “Nothing Is Wrong, I Tell Myself,” the speaker reflects on how a concussion has indirectly helped them see the world in a different way: “The mind’s door,//which opens and shuts/like a haunted memory game” is soothed by “walking the flooded lawn//back to the porch after an early swim/across the flooded lake.” The shift from what was into what is now is unsettling as we move through various stages of life, but a rallying call of “it me!” after a swim means that the swim through a nearby water body can pull us back to ourselves as we are.

In poems like “Night Swimming, Fall Equinox,” Swanson captures the fluidity of queer desire in the lines: “Remember/under that go-go moon//how we twisted/out of even our names?” and “we added//our daily recommended/allowance of heat to the still//water.” In “Can We Talk about Pleasure?”, the speaker says: “Yes//to pleasure, & yes again,/until we can splash//back into this at will, yes.” Desire is as fluid as the element of water, and this is reflected in the lines of poetry that slip through lakes, ponds, rivers, and language. The poet is a deft craftsperson, inviting the reader into the pieces to step outside of the contrived and constructed “bodies”  and structures that humans are so often forced to fit into during their work lives.

What’s obvious in reading Anna Swanson’s The Garbage Poems is the amount of care and craft that has gone into creating these poems. A complementary “read” would be to visit Swanson’s website and explore the interactive page that shows the source of each word in each poem. What comes to mind after a close reading of this work is that the oppressive constructs of land-based living can be escaped through a swim, but there is also a reminder that when we return to shore, we need to attend to the state of what we’ve left behind. We must be able to consider how we deal with the rubbish that’s been thoughtlessly cast off and consider how best to mend and take better care of the environments within which we live, walk, and swim.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Jérôme Melançon : Pigeon rouge, by David Galvaude

Pigeon rouge, David Galvaude
Les Éditions de la maison en feu, 2025

 

 

 

Before it was amalgamated together with Aylmer and Gatineau – the latter itself the product of an earlier amalgamation, and the entity that gave its name to the newly formed municipality – Hull formed a quasi-entity with Ottawa. Known in statistics as part of “Ottawa-Hull” and gathering in name only the cities on the north side of the rivière des Outaouais, Hull existed in great part, though not chiefly, through the morning southbound and afternoon northbound movement of commuting and carpooling vehicles on a few bridges. Québécois civil servants would work in Ottawa, and return to sleep and shop in Hull, Gatineau, or Aylmer. Oh, and for a while after the Bytown market bars would close, people would continue partying in the Promenade du Portage bars, often brawling. But then they harmonized the hours, so peace ensued once more (at least that’s the story I’ve heard).

In the middle of these loosely held together urban spaces, there exist organic neighbourhoods – which are currently being destroyed by gentrification and, let’s face it, time and the erosion of any kind of village-like life. “Hull” itself is, was, not so much a city as a cluster of neighbourhoods without a clear downtown area, but a clearly defined bureaucratic centre.

Headless and limbless as it is, Hull is certainly not a character in David Galvaude’s collection Pigeon rouge (Red Pigeon). Instead, he fills it with all sorts of supernatural beings. The matchstick houses from the first years of the city become monsters with doors for mouths, eternally helplessly facing each other. There are butterfly wrecks in Galvaude’s head and ghosts escaping from his ears – these beings exist in a flash, lost, seeking for connection, without clear agency. The night itself is a witch; several witches inhabit Hull, including in the Domaine Fairview, where they resist the paving of streets and the management of land by the National Capital Commission. These, it turns out, have an agenda of their own, and Galvaude and his speaker are happy to assist.

Thus Hull is “materialised insanity.” Galvaude speaks of Dante coming to get him but smokes up with him rather than taking him anywhere… or perhaps turns the city into a disco, “vieux-hull inferno.” He lives in the inescapable shadow of the Terrasses Chaudière (you know, those brown high-rise office towers by the Portage bridge), whose main tower, it turns out, is a deep fryer and a cage for the sun. This insanity is already spreading: his experience of the city goes together with the disaster that is gentrification and mass evictions. Galvaude’s outlook is consistently absurd and silly: “property is theft like seagulls / taking off from the maisonneuve mcdonald’s” (la propriété c’t’un vol de mouette / au-d’ssus du mcdo maisonneuve, 18).

Why “red pigeon” then? Because eventually, Galvaude wakes up as one. Before that, he is born again with each fall. He appears as a wolverine at the Pataterie hulloise, a white tiger who wants to be giant (this, after the giant tiger store was bled dry by the city), a chromatic bear, a moth, a blue peacock, something with teeth – “we’re getting closer but that still ain’t quite it” (on s’rapproche mais c’pas encore tout à fait ça, 30) – a lizard, a crab, a bat (a green bat, une chauve-souris verte, like the tv show La souris verte), and then finally:

c’est ça    qui est ça
I’m a goddamn red pigeon with eclipses for wings
and the entire world is just a big almond
a ticket that should be handed out like a dish that’s best served cold
so that all the police cruisers crash into one another
in a sweet and sour city that soils itself
I’m a goddamn red pigeon
I’ve got a job to do
and I’m making sure that there’s room for everyone. 

that’s it   that’s all
chu un fuckin’ pigeon rouge avec des ailes d’éclipses
pis le monde entier c’t’une grosse amande
qu’y faudrait servir comme un plat qui s’mange froid
pour que toutes les chars de police s’écrasent les uns contre les autres
dans une ville sweet and sour qui s’oublie
chu un fuckin’ pigeon rouge
j’ai une job à faire
pis j’m’assure que y’a d’la place pour tout le monde. (34)

Was he transformed by the witches, or did they allow him to be reborn entirely? Throughout this second section, a narrative that is unified through a constant transformation, Galvaude mixes nostalgia and loss with a sense of hope for the future, death with rebirth, pause with briefly beautiful images and exaggerated metaphors.

As still and patient as this metamorphic being may be, the red pigeon favours action in the third section. Here he constantly drops kinds of red berries, which we can guess will first splatter and stain and look like blood, before burrowing in the ground and growing anew:

baneberries at the corner of Kent and Laval, “on spectacular merchants of sleep / who wait for misery to do its work / who dream of sponsored exorcism” (sur les marchands d’sommeil spectaculaires / qui attendent qu’la misère fasse sa job / qui rêvent d’exorcisme commandité, 41);

elderberries behind the Burger King, while “the seagulls look at me go / I see in their eyes / that they’d like to abolish the streets” (les mouettes me checkent aller / j’vois dans leurs yeux / qu’y aimeraient ça supprimer les rues, 44);

lingonberries in the Gatineau Parc, falling out of his full mouth, taking the place of the imported cherry trees;

bittersweet nightshade on new cars and expensive houses, “hoping it’ll poison the comfort / in indifference / hoping it’ll awaken the pitch / in the tar / all while drumming with my wings the magic words / everything is free” (en espérant qu’ça empoisonne le confort / dans l’indifférence / en espérant qu’ça réveille la poix / dans l’goudron / tout ça en dodeldirant les mots magiques / tout est gratuit, 48);

and serviceberries around the Lac des Fées, “to quench their thirst” in reference to Denise Boucher’s feminist play The Fairies are Thirsty.

He also pecks at a statue of the Queen, and poops on other statues. With these seeds planted, he continues worrying about everyone having enough to get by, settles in and watches the witches’ work coming to fruition.

Pigeon rouge is a new myth, one that draws from the past and collapses time to use it to destroy the present. One destruction replaces another, bringing hope instead of ruin, as Galvaude seeks “to actively refuse the spectacle of disintegration / by crashing the chasse-galerie / right into the canadien museum of history” (refuser activement le spectacle de la désintégration / en faisant crasher la chasse-galerie / direct dans l’musée canadien de l’histoire, 47). As the witches’ incantation rise, a barn burns, a shadow spans over everything – and the birds take over.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth chapbook, avoice be heard, is now out with above/ground press, alongside the previous three: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020). His most recent collections are Prairial·es and En d’sous d’la langue, both with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his occasional translations and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Derek Beaulieu : Typewriter Art (or not?), by Margaret A.V. Gill

Typewriter Art (or not?), Margaret A.V. Gill
Oiso Books, 2026

 

 

I first encountered images from this series when publisher Tom Gill posted them on Facebook, asking the wider community what they thought of the writing of Margaret A.V. Gill, his 88-year-old aunt. I was as enthusiastic then as I am now. When exposed to her nephew’s editorial work on Keith Armstrong’s RUHuman (an exceptional overview, which is available here: https://the-case.co.uk/books/ruhuman/) Ms. Gill was unsure of Armstrong’s output, and how it could be defined as poetry, but she replied in a way that I find incredibly inspiring: she wrote back.

Typewriter Art (or not?) takes diaristic-epistolary approach to reading through RUHuman and documents Gill’s engagement with form, process, and thinking. While the initial pieces were, the author admits, created in “puzzlement” and “parody” or Armstrong’s work, the shaped poems begin to take on another role. Drafted primarily using Paint Shop Pro-7 (having long abandoned typewriters), Gill’s poems move from parody into self-discovery. The poems may have started with aesthetic resistance, but as the book progresses, the author admits that her explorations begin to include references as diverse as Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Hokusai’s The Great Wave, artwork begets artwork interwoven with references to other texts, each indicative of a poet with an open mind; a mind which may have started in doubt but moved into creative response.

The final section of Typewriter Art (or not?) applies the compositional methods that Gill developed in response to Keith Armstrong’s work to create work which centers on her faith, how her faith guides her position in community, and reflects on her role in the Aldermaston Peace marches (which advocated for Great Britain to declare unilateral disarmament as a means to advocate that other countries do the same).

At 54 pages Typewriter Art (or not?) is a slim volume but one that adroitly demonstrates the act of amateur artistic reflection and creation. The author may see herself as puzzled and resistant to writing which is outside of her experience, but instead of being closed, responds in kind. As I said, I see Margaret Gill as embodying the best in poetic response: a willingness to ask questions, to attempt the form, to reply, and the self-reflection to change her opinion and allow poetry to then become a tool for her to speak of her own experience.

*

Oiso Books’s Piktogram bilingual English/Japanese imprint is “a new occasional series of pamphlets dedicated to exciting artists/poets working in vispo – visual poetry, or the crossover zone between poetry and art.” Typewriter Art (or not?) is the first in the series, with further forthcoming titles from Robin Tomens (UK) and Takahiro Sawamura (Japan), check out piktogram.oisobooks.com for more information.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent book, Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the 21^st Century, was published by Assembly Press in the Spring of 2026. Beaulieu has received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his dedication to Albertan literature and CCWWP Robert Kroetsch Award for excellence in innovative pedagogy and teaching practice. He is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award’ and the only graduate in creative writing to receive Roehampton University’s Chancellor’s Alumni Award. Beaulieu has served as Poet Laureate of both Calgary and Banff and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He can be found online at www.derekbeaulieu.ca

 

Melanie Marttila : My Mother Joins the Resistance, by Richard Harrison

My Mother Joins the Resistance, Richard Harrison
Wolsak & Wynn, 2026

 

 

 

Richard Harrison’s My Mother Joins the Resistance is a meditation on love and life and death and grief. Through the poems in this collection, Harrison processes his mother’s life and the death by medical assistance in dying (MAID), which she chose as an alternative to terminal lung cancer in 2017, and to which Harrison and his brother were witnesses.

In the 12 days leading up to her death, Harrison and his brother took care of their mother and talked with her continually. She partook of “Twelve Last Suppers” growing stronger in her last days of life:

“having lived on the most meagre of meals for years

to keep her body thin and cancer-free,

and the irony of it was, it was the inoperable cancer

that came on anyway that let her find again

a child’s innocence with food.”

And,

“[i]n the garden where we fattened the sparrows,

she set down the final version of her life,

story by story,

until she was satisfied its meaning was clear.”

In his introduction, Harrison offers two paragraphs titled simply 1939 and 2017. In 1939, Doreen Howard was one of the children packed off to the British countryside in Operation Pied Piper, which was famously fictionalized in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In 2017, Harrison and his brother shared those final 12 days with their mother.

The first few poems speak of observation, of family and memory and love, of the excavation of the past and how we see our lost loved ones everywhere, in a “fragment of tusk”, “a small, dried hand”. These poems frame the work of the collection.

Harrison then turns that lens on “A Photograph of Doreen Elizabeth Howard, Six Years Old, in 1934” in which he

“… find[s] that face that was yours before

that man used you as if you had no being of your own.

But in your final minute in a hospital bed

I saw her face return to yours

and look on life again, at last,

weightless and without sorrow.”

 

Doreen was a long-distance swimmer who “trained to take on the Channel”, despised Churchill, the hero of WWII, who subsequently “sent bayonets against picket lines / and the working class she was born to”.

Unable to find a home in America which upheld the myth of Churchill, she moved to Canada with its then socialist leanings, met and married Ralph Harrison, himself fresh out of the British army.

She had also been betrayed and abused by the person who was supposed to be her caregiver during Operation Pied Piper. She was institutionalized when Harrison was nine, having held the secret of her abuse too long. Afterward, “for years she kept trying to make us understand / the ache she could not ease by telling the truth alone.”

In the end, Doreen was a woman who announced, smiling, “I’ll be dead by the end of the week” to a young teller at the bank. Having signed her MAID agreement days before, she’s there to pass on to her son “the treasure and secrets / of her material life” contained in her safety deposit box. She was a woman who recited poems memorized in her youth but never spoken until she was on the road to her chosen death.

There are also family dogs, superheroes, Father (and Father’s ghost), brother, gardening, nature, archaeology, the pandemic, Saint Peter, and poems for family and the doctor who administered the final injection.

In the title poem, Doreen, waiting for the doctor who will deliver her death, declares of hurricane Cindy, “When it pours down on the White House, that’s me pissing on Trump!” What a glorious woman!

The whole collection delivers surprising hope and humour out of the darkest events. I adored every page.

 

 

 

 

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.

rob mclennan : SUBTEXT, by Nicole Raziya Fong

SUBTEXT, Nicole Raziya Fong
Talonbooks, 2026

 

 

 

The third full-length collection from Montreal poet and collaborator Nicole Raziya Fong is SUBTEXT (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), a title that follows a handful of chapbooks including Fargone (2014), Leguminosae Delusion Athletics (with Andy Martrich; Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021) and FLIGHT MODE IN THE CITY (Spiral Editions, 2023), as well as their full-length debut, PEЯFACT (Talonbooks, 2019), “a three-part series of poems interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity,” and OЯACULE (Talonbooks, 2021), a book the author described in their 2019 “12 or 20 questions” interview as “a psychic window into suppressed memory, lived resistance and anger.” Furthering their book-length investigations through language, memory and trauma, the back cover of SUBTEXT describes the collection as one that “peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories.”

As the opening sequence of accumulating and self-contained stanzas, includes: “Every morning I consider what it is / I’d like to remove from myself and / give back to you. I extract this thing / with decisiveness, writing it down / on my hands with black ink before / falling back into the depths of sleep.” The collage of  SUBTEXT includes bursts of short scenes, strings of collaged phrases and reversed text, inverted images and narrative overlays, attempting a clarity through a process that itself is purposefully obscured, blurred, fragmented, and, at times, even cinematic. Further in the same sequence, writing: “Memory levels the spaces I’ve / set aside for transformation.” At the back of the collection, Fong’s “AUTHOR NOTE” closes:

The poetic and theoretical modes of SUBTEXT allow memory to manifest in forms that resist narrative closure, moving in the mode of what Édouard Glissant termed errantry (l’errance). The poetics of errantry is rhizomatic, moving through multiplicity, polyvocality, and contradiction while refusing a singular point of origin. Errantry allows for a model of identity that is composite and relation-based, one which embraces the diffusions and opacities specific to diasporic experience.

SUBTEXT is woven from autobiographical thread: traces of light I shone into the unknowable darkness of the unconscious, where the Analyst might have said that answers existed.

This project is an errant archive.

Fong certainly isn’t the first literary writer to explore memory, trauma and family archive in writing as a way through—recent further examples might include Montreal poet and editor Darby Minott Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself (London ON: Brick Books, 2021), Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021), Ottawa poet and editor Margo LaPierre’s Ajar (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025) or American poet chaun webster’s nonfiction title, Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026)—but rarely is this done through such an open structure of experimentation through form and the unconscious. Shifting and reinterpreting meaning through visual overlays and stitched lines, the effect is one of a shifting foundation, purposefully so, attempting to tear at the roots to construct something entirely and uniquely transformed, and thus, reclaimed. In the opening section, Fong writes: “Just because something / appears does not mean it has / shown itself. What does not / show itself is something that / can never seem (show itself / as something it’s not). With / ease I can picture myself as / I am now, which is to say, / changed, [...].” A declaration through the archive isn’t enough, but an entire rebuilding of what the archive has wrought, pulled apart and reassembled, forces the archive to thus justify its existence at every level. As their author biography at the end of the collection offers: “Their artistic work seeks to delimit and reconstruct the incorporeal into inhabiting a more muscular physique.” The way through such trauma is unknowable, so why not the language, certainly, pushing the possibilities of how one articulates or works a text as a way to document and archive, set down on the page any element of that level of intimate trauma. As part of their interview for Touch the Donkey (published March 2020), Fong responds:

Perhaps you could say that in my first, PERFACT, I was just beginning this process of engaging with language and memory in an exploratory way. The writing I’m doing now is at once a crystallization and expansion of the concerns I had perhaps unconsciously begun broaching in PERFACT but weren’t fully developed there. For whatever reason I feel a lot less constrained by formal expectations now than I did in PERFACT and the ability to see the page as an expansive site of potential rather than a rigid, lineated space by which concept should be conveyed in a particular manner has been exciting for me. I really can’t say where my work is headed as I never know what is coming until it comes. The work changes as I do, in an equally unpredictable way.

SUBTEXT is assembled into four extended sections—“Neutral Grey,” “SUBTEXT,” “Disagreement Over the Cloud’s True Colour Interactions” and “Scenes on Heartbreak”—there is something compelling in the way that this particular work exists as an ongoing exploration and examination, both on family history and how trauma has impacted them, but an interrogation into the process of working through such experiences through the archive, through text. Fong’s texts don’t let up any less on their own purposes and reasonings, pushing a way through to think openly and honestly on how and what language interrogates, just as much as it interrogates.

I wake up in Montréal; it’s late afternoon.
From where I stand, the clouds seem tinted
with an orange hue. 

 

       I am born.

I mean enactment in the sense of an expressive
language parting from metaphor. Not to
transform things into appearance, but to make
them exist in the entirety of their being. Yet while
“the uncovering destroys a deception; it does not
discover anything authentically appearing.”

 

“What we seem to be to others” – I want to say –
“is only a part of what we are.” 

I mean, it’s not a part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is very famous and has lots of friends. His latest poetry title edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026) recently published, as well as the book-length essay A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (Caitlin Press, 2026), and new chapbooks Small studies in blue (Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (Subpress, 2026).