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Poetry

Sam Cheuk's Reading Recommendations

Sam Cheuk is a Hong Kong-born Canadian poet and author of Love Figures (Insomniac Press, 2011), Deus et Machina (Baseline Press, 2017) and Postscripts from a City Burning (Palimpsest Press, 2021) on the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and its aftermath. #StandWithHongKong #香港人加油 #MilkTeaAlliance. Sam's poems are featured in issue 289 (Autumn 2021) of The Fiddlehead

"11/11/19" An Excerpt From Sam Cheuk's Poetry Selection

11/11/19 by Sam Cheuk


Necessity is the mother of invention
but the city is running out of material.
Tho the young keep impressing,
behind a secret of umbrellas
the frontline dreams a catapult
from scaffold of bamboo stalks.

A friend, when in Romania, gushed on
about pep rallies students held
to sever blood debt, same two words
scrawled across the walls here,
minus the romance among
the Montagues & Capulets.

Asking the Impossible: A Review by Dominique Béchard of Virginia Konchan's "Any God Will Do"

Asking the Impossible

Any God Will Do, Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020.

 

While reading Halifax-based poet Virginia Konchan’s second collection, I experienced my capacity for feeling — in the broadest, most contradictory sense — expand. In fact, Any God Will Do seems to me essentially about excess (of feeling, of stimulus, of being) and about the idea of divinity as an overwhelming localization of the too-much.

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