Category: Poetry

As we receieve submissions for the upcoming BIPOC Solidarities special issue, we'll be featuring our wonderful team of editors who are working to bring the issue together. 

This special issue is meant as an opening, extending the invitation to BIPOC writers to transform the content and spirit of The Fiddlehead far beyond a single issue; this issue is a commitment to transformation and accountability.

Rebecca Salazar - BIPOC Solidarities Special Issue Editor:

As we receieve submissions for the upcoming BIPOC Solidarities special issue, we'll be featuring our wonderful team of editors who are working to bring the issue together. 

This special issue is meant as an opening, extending the invitation to BIPOC writers to transform the content and spirit of The Fiddlehead far beyond a single issue; this issue is a commitment to transformation and accountability.

Rabbits on the Balcony by Emma Miao is the winning poem from our 2020 Poetry Contest:

Rose Maloukis

These Weeds

Spasms trouble a tired body, little flesh, no hunger. 
Leaves cycle, vanish, more and more empty sky.

Dishes fallen to the floor. A mouthful of beaten rice — I cannot swallow! 

A purple balloon buffeted by slow circulation, no direct draft.
Surface highlights, rotations wobble, roll then lull, they are imbalanced.
Are you alive if your breath — the balloon, under the blouse, senseless —
         vacant.

Georgette LeBlanc's poems "neufs mot," "aux États," and "retour de l'exil" were originally published in Alma (Éditions Perce-Neige, 2007). They are reprinted here and in our Autumn 2019 issue with permission, and with many thanks to Perce-Neige.

On August 25, 2018, The Fiddlehead hosted the first of our planned events leading up to our 75th anniversary in 2020. We brought Alicia Elliott, our nonfiction editor, and Rebecca Thomas to Fredericton to give workshops, and while they were here, we organized a reading that also featured local Fredericton writer Anthazia Kadir. 

Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts (for a Public Outreach Grant), the Fredericton Public Library, and Ty Giffin and Mathew Gracie (videographers). And thanks to Anthazia, Alicia, and Rebecca for their superb readings!

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

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!

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.

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.