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Current Issue: No. 301

Stephanie Bolster's Reading Recommendations

I've had a great run of poetry reading this summer; having just begun a long-anticipated sabbatical, I'm finally getting to books that have been on my list for a long time: Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Renee Sarojini Saklikar's Children of Air India, Soraya Peerbaye's Tell. These books have heightened my growing feeling that the best contemporary poetry engages with larger issues, generally difficult ones. (That is, larger than the issue of how to write a good poem.

No. 268 (Summer 2016)

Introductions: Ross Leckie and Ian LeTourneau.

Poetry: Mary Jo Salter, Alyda Faber, Marlene Cookshaw, Ruth Roach Pierson, Michael Prior, Teresa Ott, Shane Neilson, Ben Ladouceur, Don McKay, Thylias Moss, Dani Couture, Cassidy McFadzean, Charles Wright, Lynn Davies, John Steffler, Gregory Scofield, Jan Zwicky, Patricia Young, Weyman Chan, Joseph Kidney, Dina Del Bucchia, Stevie Howell, and Les Murray. 

Reviews: Thomas Hodd, M. Travis Lane, Susan Haley, Mark Dickinson, Shane Neilson, Triny Finlay, and Richard Kelly Kemick.

Brian Bartlett's Reading Recommendations

Wislawa Szymborksa’s poems in translation — both ones I first read about 20 years ago and ones recently new to me — have been satisfying me at deep levels with their mixes of the everyday and the surreally fanciful, the grieving and the humorous, the raw and the powerfully shaped. Last month I read a few of the poems to my brother-in-law in a hospital during his final week of life.

What Aislinn Hunter is Listening To

This past month I’ve been obsessing over video recordings of Van Morrison concerts, especially early performances from the 70s and 80s. This is partly because I’ve been thinking a lot about poetic pacing and what I guess I’ll call ‘rawness’ in poetry — moments of risk-taking and truth-telling, registers of feeling that create something almost textural in a poem.

Radio Fiddlehead No. 6: Reading by Robert Gibbs

Welcome to our latest Fiddlehead Radio podcast. In this podcast, we bring you a poetry reading by Robert Gibbs. Bob (as we know him) sat down with then Fiddlehead editorial assistant Greg Brown back in April 2014 to record sixteen poems selected from The Essential Robert Gibbs, published by Porcupine’s Quill in 2012, and All Things Considered, published in 2013 by Oberon Books. 

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