We're excited to announce the winner of our 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize is Jaeyun Yoo for her poem "have you seen my father"! Jaeyun Yoo will receive $2000 in prize money and her poem will appear in the Spring 2023 issue of The Fiddlehead. You can read the poem or listen to a reading of it by Jaeyun Yoo now on our website.
Ian Stephens’s lone book-length publication, Diary of a Trademark, feels like something of a lost classic, a rough (in all senses of the word) snapshot of early-nineties Montreal through the eyes of a gay man who died soon after the book was published. In Diary, Stephens knows he is succumbing to HIV/AIDS and, in the essay that opens the collection, “Weary State of Grace,” discusses a recent hospital stay in visceral detail.
I am a bit of a trash bird and love collecting odd things—a little taxidermied turtle I’ve named Tertullian, century-old birthday books filled with the soft cursive of strangers, quack medicine almanacs, a yellowed trade card where a burning Joan of Arc sells bouillon. One of my favorite things is a Morrell Pride calendar from 1938.
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!
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.
While I’m happy to write, I’m just as pleased to read. This is what Poetry Weekend means to me. My poems, my friends’ poems, the moving words of professionals and colleagues and artists are all the better heard echoing from the walls of Memorial Hall. I’ve only attended in-person twice; I started reading my own work during the Zoom years. I’ve been writing my whole life but poetry only for three years, and I know I have so much to learn and catch up on. This makes two days of poets and their work so valuable and so fulfilling.
"Angry Indian Aunty Prof" by Conor Kerr
In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom merges her background as a particle physicist with poetry. She excavates intangible and indescribable moments from scientific experiments to blur lines between worlds that otherwise seem separate.
