Poetry Editor Chuqiao Yang's Interview with 2025 Poetry Contest winner Melanie Power whose poem "Ode to the Bakeapple" was published in Issue 307 (Spring 2026)
Chuqiao Yang: This is a fantastic poem to read to yourself, quietly on a patio in the or performed – a hard feat to accomplish! Tell us about how you were able to achieve such musicality and versatility – visually on the page, read in solitude, or read out loud.
Melanie Power: I think what may lend the poem those qualities (thank you for saying so!) is its conversational tone. Once the idea for the poem struck me, I immediately consulted my aunt Ellie, queen of bakeapples, and my semi-exclusive supplier of bakeapple jam. Then I called my cousin, Jenn, who I recalled had a bakeapple tattoo, and so of course would be a highly important berry consultant (and turns out, feature of the poem!). Parts of the poem emerged from those two conversations, which perhaps fostered a sense of intimacy and ease.
CY: Similar to your collection, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving, this poem at first glance reads as joyous and playful, but as a reader, I was also left with a sense of longing for a sense of home too. I find it’s easy to write a very sad poem, but it’s tougher sometimes to write a poem that’s got a blend of emotions. Can you tell us about how, if at all, this poem changed from the first draft to the last, and how you added so many layers of meaning?
MP: I'm most compelled by feelings that are complicated, layered, contradictory. I can't say the poem changed much from the first draft to the final one. Sometimes a given image or observation or feeling has been germinating for so long that, by the time the urge to record it occurs, the line emerges easily (and easy doesn't mean painless!).
CY: There’s a line in your poem where you say the fruit is known as the bakeapple in your region – “but our language is tailor-made,/stolen or inherited, like the landscape.” Can you speak to that?
MP: We have many interesting words that feel tailormade to the place I grew up– words like skeet, crooked, mauzy, streel. My grandfather was a crooked man. How else could I describe him? But, like a lot of English, many words and place names derive from other colonial or Indigenous sources. Language is, to put it briefly, fraught. In the latter part of the line, I'm referring to the theft of land, by settlers, from Indigenous people--theft conducted either directly–through botched treaties, forced relocation and the like--or indirectly, through other forms of systemic colonial violence (the scope of which an interview question response cannot adequately cover.) I was thinking of Mi'kmaq people in particular when I wrote that line, who are integral to the history and present of Ktaqamkuk, and whose innovative uses of various regional berries is well-documented.
CY: Do you feel like your time in Montreal has changed your perspective on your upbringing in Newfoundland? And in turn, how that’s influenced the way you write about home and identity?
MP: In a big city, you meet so many fascinating, strange people; each person's story, if you get to know it, is a kind of calibration of your own. You also end up in environments that you can't have any preparation for: working at a pop-up luxury restaurant at a tennis tournament (many years ago now, but it was awful!). Experiences like those helped to refine insights about the context in which I grew up, about how a convenience store or small berry can be personally or culturally important.
CY: Is there a particular part of the poem you’re especially proud of and would like to share the story behind?
MP: I love the image of my great-aunt, Annie, working over a beef bucket near the end of the poem (credit to my cousin Jenn for that one!). I spent many afternoons in her house, now my aunt's, in the community where my dad grew up. It's so vivid in my mind, that house–even the smell of it, which is a kind of a papery, earthy sweetness.
— Melanie Power is a Montreal-based poet from St. John’s. Her debut, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving, was published in 2022 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in oral history and creative writing at Concordia University.
Read and listen to "Ode to the Bakeapple"
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