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Hello! My name is Kait and I’m a great lover of the written word! Having recently completed my English degree at Carleton University, I’m currently working at the public library in Kingston, Ontario, and enjoying every minute of it. In the meantime, I spend my days working on my first novel and petting my fluffy cat!

Ian Stephens’s lone book-length publication, Diary of a Trademark, feels like something of a lost classic, a rough (in all senses of the word) snapshot of early-nineties Montreal through the eyes of a gay man who died soon after the book was published. In Diary, Stephens knows he is succumbing to HIV/AIDS and, in the essay that opens the collection, “Weary State of Grace,” discusses a recent hospital stay in visceral detail. The entire collection of poetry and prose is intense and unyielding: the sex is graphic and the rage burns hot.

I am a bit of a trash bird and love collecting odd things—a little taxidermied turtle I’ve named Tertullian, century-old birthday books filled with the soft cursive of strangers, quack medicine almanacs, a yellowed trade card where a burning Joan of Arc sells bouillon. One of my favorite things is a Morrell Pride calendar from 1938.

Editorial assistant Tommy Duggan reviews Back to the Land of the Living by Eva Crocker (Anansi, 2023)

Eva Crocker’s Back to the Land of the Living begins with our protagonist Marcy Pike moving to pre-COVID Montreal from St. John’s on a journey of self-discovery and newfound independence.

I loved Jennifer Bowering Delisle's latest book, Micrographia, in which Delisle juxtaposes her experiences of infertility and motherhood with her own mother's declining health and medically-assisted death. These lyric essays are luminous and questioning, searching for meaning in everyday moments as well as times of intense emotion. Woven with history, etymology, mythology, medicine, and law, the ambitious structure of these essays elevates the artistry and compassion that shine through on every page. 

I came to poetry through music: strange rhyming songs and lullabies as a kid, an absolute obsession with lyrics as a teenager, and now as an eclectic collector of songs that remind me of poems in some way. So I’m recommending music—interesting music that you may not have heard before, Joshua Burnside’s Ephrata. I happened upon it a few years ago, encouraged by an album write-up that mentioned the many hours he spent on his own in a small room, recording all sorts of different sounds, and then layering them together with melody and his poetic lyrics.

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the finalists of our 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, judged by Kirby, Sadiqa de Meiher, and Rebecca Salazar! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced in early April 2024 and the winning poem will appear in the Spring 2024 issue (299). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!

For more than a year now, I have not read a book of my choosing for myself.  

Reading remains, in its many facets and prisms of accessibility, a privilege – and the freedom to read what one wishes continues to be a luxury.  

During this time I have read poems, snatches of news articles, and fleeting glimpses of bus ads – but mostly I have spent the better part of the year reading things to my children. Board books with my now 14-month-old daughter, and larger, more substantial books with my soon to be six-year-old son.  

Having devoured Catriona Wright’s first collection of poetry I was very excited to hear her second collection would be out in May 2023. True to her brilliance, Continuity Errors makes me thankful I have been so lucky to come across Wright’s work and thankful she continues to contribute her voice to Canadian poetry. Go Catriona Go!

Is a poet’s life the support for poetry, or is poetry a support for the poet’s life? As much as Santoka Tenada, a mendicant Zen priest and haiku poet of the twentieth century, tried to live a good life according to the Tao, his inveterate love of sake and general need to carouse left him with poetry as the only means of perfecting what he was unable to perfect in life: mainly, the thing in us that wants to be better, the thing which, for a host of competing reasons, we are usually unable to achieve in life.