We're pleased to announce that Paige Cooper's story "The Roar" has been longlisted for the 2016 Journey Prize! "The Roar" appeared in last summer's Fiction issue (no. 264).
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.
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.
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.
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.
