Category: Features

Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poem "Fabric" won the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem as part of The Fiddlehead's 26 annual literary contest. You can read an interview with Bernier-Cormier here. 

Fabric
October 31st, 2016

By Jenna Albert

Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poems have recently appeared in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, and Poetry is Dead, and won honourable mentions in CV2's Young Buck Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2016. His first chapbook, Englishing, will be published this spring by Frog Hollow Press. 

Editorial Assistant Jenna Albert conducted this interview by email in mid-March.

----

This past weekend, Fiddlehead contributor Doyali Islam was on CBC's Sunday Morning talkiing with Michael Enright about "her childhood, the role of poetry in political resistance, and why she became a practitioner of parkour." As part of the discussion, she read "poem for your pocket," which we published last Autumn (The Fiddlehead, no. 269)! 

You can listen to the interview here!

By Andrew Ramos.

Kate Finegan has won The Fiddlehead’s 26th annual Short Fiction Prize for her story “Blues Too Bright.” The following interview was conducted via email with Editorial Assistant Andrew Ramos in March 2017.

----

By Grace Annear

Sheila McClarty’s "Flag Girl" appears in The Fiddlehead No. 269 (Autumn 2016). The explosive story depicts a woman processing the ravages of cancer. With a straightforward voice, it uses stunning sensory details to focalize a rich and paradoxical point of view. 

By Andrew Ramos

Richard Kelly Kemick’s story “This All Brings Me to Now” appears in the Autumn 2016 issue of The Fiddlehead. He has been published in literary magazines and journals across Canada and the United States, most recently in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Carte Blanche, and Tin House. His debut collection of poetry, Caribou Run, appeared in spring 2016 from Goose Lane Editions. 

By Rachel Rose

Three writers: Birgül Oğuz, Karen Villeda, and Betsy Warland. Three different countries: Turkey, Mexico, Canada. Each writer grapples with gender and identity, with loss, with the limits of language, with persistence against the conspiracies of silence, with responding to violence as part of the quotidian, as part of civilian life. On the surface these writers appear to have little in common, and yet their answers, though written separately and thousands of miles apart, seem part of the same conversation.

Very recently, The Atlantic published “The Greatest Poet Alive: The Feral Genius of Australia’s Les Murray,” a gushing, appreciative overview of Murray’s career disguised as a review of his latest book Waiting for the Past. It is far from alone in its adoration of Murray’s distinguished career. Though he does have his detractors, and he was a major figure in Australia’s “poetry wars,” his name is regularly included on lists of potential Nobel Prize winners, and Joseph Brodsky’s claim that Murray is “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives” is oft-quoted.

What is summer in Canada but a figment of our imagination. So how better to celebrate summer than to translate summer’s haze into the tangible leaves you hold in your hands right now, though poems, perhaps, are only words in passing. Poems might wander into the woods or slip down a rank alley, but we can follow them and let them hold us for a moment. You should take them to your summer haunts. Fire escape, cottage porch, side of the road, café, diner, pub, bar, flopped on a sofa with a fan playing across your body, on the beach, by the lake, on the river bank, on a park bench.

I was thrilled to work with Katie Fewster-Yan to select poems from across the career of Mary Jo Salter. Together we debated, tussled, and celebrated over the choosing of this selection, which we hope you will enjoy.