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I’ve read a lot of great and varied books this year so far, everything from queer romance noir fantasies to nonfiction about moss, but the work that has stuck with me the most is You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith. 

This work, a memoir by a poet best known for her poem Good Bones, which has gone viral more than once, is the work that has most resonated with me in the last few months. 

I learned of Lucky Lo’s album, Supercarry, by happy coincidence. 

Needing a weeknight drink, I went to a friend’s café in Odense, Denmark, only to find the café already stuffed with guests–young and old, plain and flamboyant–hunched around the tables, a buzz of anticipation in the air. 

The irony behind the “Doodling for Writers” catchphrase, “If you can write, you can draw” is that I was introduced to this book during a workshop I took because I was in a slump and could not write. My need to create pushed me to explore alternate means of expression, which led me to a comics workshop and this book. 

Accompanied with the book’s introductory chapter is a cartoon of a cat laden with bags bearing the labels “Failure Fears,” “Success Fears,” and “Fear of the New,” and an eager-looking dog asking, “Were we supposed to bring our baggage?” 

While I’m happy to write, I’m just as pleased to read. This is what Poetry Weekend means to me. My poems, my friends’ poems, the moving words of professionals and colleagues and artists are all the better heard echoing from the walls of Memorial Hall. I’ve only attended in-person twice; I started reading my own work during the Zoom years. I’ve been writing my whole life but poetry only for three years, and I know I have so much to learn and catch up on. This makes two days of poets and their work so valuable and so fulfilling.

One summer, the narrator of “Husbands” arrives at an all-girls camp in Maine, her body gangling and conspicuously mature, yet she still carries a “little layer of baby fat which unfortunately had not melted away in the fires of puberty.” Thus, Emma, like all her thirteenand fourteen-year-old bunkmates, stands on the perilous threshold between childhood and adolescence. In the fog of that time, they begin to play a seemingly innocent game. “The game didn’t start with the bad stuff, that came later,” the older narrator, now married, tells us.

"Angry Indian Aunty Prof" by Conor Kerr

Omar Gandhi at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery

PURPOSE

To assess your readiness to write about a traumatic past event. This selfassessment quiz requires you to revisit, in manageable increments, the scene/ event/memory and the associated emotional, psychological and/or physical responses of the past incident you wish to write about.

PREPARATION

In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom merges her background as a particle physicist with poetry. She excavates intangible and indescribable moments from scientific experiments to blur lines between worlds that otherwise seem separate.

In the 25 years since it was given to me as a birthday present, I’ve recommended Time and the Art of Living more often than The Sixteen Pleasures or Mao’s Last Dancer.