by Megan Kuklis

A review of Melissa Barbeau's The Luminous Sea (Breakwater Books, 2018)

Please join us in celebrating The Fiddlehead's upcoming 75th anniversary by participating in a life writing workshop with writer and educator Anthazia Kadir at Pier 21 in Halifax!
This workshop is free and includes a catered lunch. It is designed for newcomers to Canada but is open to all. Participants are asked to bring a meaningful object that will inspire their writing. See poster for location details.

Marcia Walker recommends reading American novelist, playwright, and activist James Baldwin. Read Marcia's story "Mating Imperatives" in The Fiddlehead's upcoming Summer Fiction 2019 issue (No. 280)!

Jill M. Talbot recommends reading works by New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Jill M. Talbot's essay "Checkmate" appeared in The Fiddlehead No. 277 (Autumn 2018), our all creative nonfiction issue. 

Megan Denton Ray's poem "As In Blackjack" appears in issue No. 279 (Spring 2019). Click "Read More" to access her music recommendation!

By Nancy Bauer

One recent June evening I attended a mesmerizing concert at the home of artist Stephen May, the first “house concert” I’d ever attended. Six other guests came, so with the host and four musicians, we were a gathering of twelve. The intimate group was surrounded by seven glorious May paintings and one pitiful palm tree. The musicians were plainly dressed: no theatrical tricks or garish makeup. . . .

By Ross Leckie

The sacred, the profane, and the glorious mundane shimmer through Kazim Ali’s poetry. The poems are visionary in the best sense of the word. They see both the translucence and the immanence of the world, a seeing that commingles vision, remembrance, and remembering, as he puts it in “Cover Me.” “Remembrance” is the odd word out here. Unlike vision and remembering, remembrance refers to something specific, a moment of history now commemorated. For Ali vision and remembering seem to step into a ceremony of memory that is elegiac, which can be as personal as a keepsake and as social as human slaughter: the museum, the monument, and the monumental. The visionary is given a body in these poems, through sex, embrace, travel, migration, and even something as simple as walking. . . .

By Sue Sinclair

I have just looked at the mock-up of the cover for the spring issue, and its millenial pink is making me consider the possibility that the shoulder-high snowbanks lining the driveway might not last forever. Thank you, Ian, designer extraordinaire. 

There is, of course, plenty beside the colour pink that makes this issue exciting. Kazim Ali, for starters. . . .

By Megan Kuklis
A Review of Darusha Wehm's The Home for Wayward Parrots (NeWest Press, 2018)

The Home for Wayward Parrots by Darusha Wehm is a charming novel that centres on the complicated lives of its many sweet characters. Exceptionally readable, the novel flows through the past and present of Brian “Gumbo” Guillemot’s life with such care that readers will not be able to put it down. This novel should be devoured in a single sitting.

by Rebecca Salazar

The following interview was conducted via email by Editorial Assistant and member of the Poetry Board Rebecca Salazar. Kim Trainor’s poem “Paper Birch” is the winner of The Fiddlehead’s 2019 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. 

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