The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the finalists of our 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, judged by Kirby, Sadiqa de Meiher, and Rebecca Salazar! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced in early April 2024 and the winning poem will appear in the Spring 2024 issue (299). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!
For more than a year now, I have not read a book of my choosing for myself.
Reading remains, in its many facets and prisms of accessibility, a privilege – and the freedom to read what one wishes continues to be a luxury.
Having devoured Catriona Wright’s first collection of poetry I was very excited to hear her second collection would be out in May 2023. True to her brilliance, Continuity Errors makes me thankful I have been so lucky to come across Wright’s work and thankful she continues to contribute her voice to Canadian poetry. Go Catriona Go!
Is a poet’s life the support for poetry, or is poetry a support for the poet’s life? As much as Santoka Tenada, a mendicant Zen priest and haiku poet of the twentieth century, tried to live a good life according to the Tao, his inveterate love of sake and general need to carouse left him with poetry as the only means of perfecting what he was unable to perfect in life: mainly, the thing in us that wants to be better, the thing which, for a host of competing reasons, we are usually unable to achieve in life.
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.
