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Poetry

An interview with Anna Swanson

Photo of Anna Swanson in goggles swimming underwater

Editorial Assistant Melissa Spohr Weiss interviewed Anna Swanson about swimming and writing, creating “found poetry” out of “garbage words,” and her mode of poetic creation that at once came out of and embodies the lived experience of physical and cognitive constraints following a serious concussion. Anna Swanson’s poem, “Portals,” will appear in the upcoming special 75th anniversary issue of The Fiddlehead that will be published in spring

An Interview with Susan Musgrave

Image of Susan Musgrave

Editorial Assistant Melissa Spohr interviewed Susan Musgrave about her creative process, the roles of emotion, dreams, unknowing, and the subconscious, and the poet’s relationship to the poem in its becoming and ongoing revision. Three of Susan Musgrave’s poems—"More Than Seeing," "What We Do,“ and "Life in the Uncontainable World"—will appear in the upcoming special 75th anniversary issue of The Fiddlehead that will be published in spring.

Photo credit: Regina Akhankina

Kazim Ali’s Sublime Ordinary

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. . . .

The Wolf Hunter by Jason Henderson

As a literary journal housed in Fredericton, we at The Fiddlehead were moved when we received a poem from Deputy Sheriff Jason Henderson in the wake of the shooting on August 10th in our city. “The Wolf Hunter” is written in honour of law enforcement and is dedicated to Cst Robb Costello and Cst. Sara Burns of the Fredericton Police Force, both of whom were murdered that day along with citizens Donnie Robichaud and Bobbie-Lee Wright. We wish strength to everyone affected by these deaths.
—Sue Sinclair, Editor

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The Wolf Hunter

An Interview with Rebecca Thomas

Interview by Emily Skov-Nielsen, Marketing and Promotions for The Fiddlehead. Rebecca Thomas will be in Fredericton on August 25 to give a workshop "Writing Your Guts Out" from 2-4 at the Fredericton public Library and to give a reading later that evening at 7pm, also at the Fredericton Public Library. For more information, visit the Facebook event here or scroll down to see the poster.

Conor Mc Donnell

"Qui vincit? (medicamina)"

This house could hold more empty seats but the people 
who would sit in them were put away long ago.

There is no work here bring out your dead no bodies left 
to pass the piss-test, close the factory down. 

Everything is not what you read, old colic torques to form 
new cancer a different diagnosis to ponder,

collections of atypical things eventually typify something
— backpain, beatings, boredom, parties —

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