One of the poetry collections that I keep coming back to is a book of ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The beloved Kashmiri-American poet has been an absolute favorite of mine ever since I discovered him in my early twenties. His poems pave a path towards a level of lyric expansiveness with their tri-cultural — Hindu, Muslim, and for the lack of a better word, the Western — juxtaposition, which very few South Asian poets have ventured out to do.
We're excited to announce that Luanne Gauvreau is the winner of our 2024 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story "Roses for Bodies" will be featured in the upcoming Winter issue of The Fiddlehead (FH 302).
Luanne Gauvreau lives in Ottawa where she is a writer and editor, in body and spirit. “Roses for Bodies” is drawn from a novel in progress exploring the nature of work and art in a world so in need of real action.
Editorial Assistant Miriam Richer Interviews Petra Chambers whose three poems appear in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)
Miriam Richer: All three of your poems, in one sense or another, are about the speaker’s relationship to the past—revisiting a childhood home, reminiscing about adolescence, identifying with a rescue animal’s inscrutable history. How does the passage of time figure into your poetry?
Thirty years ago, I read A.S Byatt’s Possession, the Booker Award winner of 1990, and was possessed by the novel. After her death, in November, 2023, I decided to revisit it, and (sorry for verbal overplay), was repossessed.
