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
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.
Antonia Petschauer lives in Victoria, where she is Vice Editor-in-Chief of the open-concept art magazine The Warren Undergraduate Review. Antonia's poetry will appear in the upcoming Autumn issue (289) of The Fiddlehead.
Ann DeVilbiss has had work in BOAAT Journal, Gertrude, The Maine Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in PANK Magazine. Her chapbook, When the Wolves Stay Quiet, is available from dancing girl press, and she lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky. Find more of her at anndevilbiss.com. Don't forget to look for Ann's poem Gut Feeling in the upcoming Autumn issue of The Fiddlehead!
. . . she opened the door of a star quietly
Poems — Selected Books Volume II, Yannis Ritsos Trans. Manolis Aligizakis. Ekstasis Editions, 2020
Jane Shi is a queer Chinese settler living on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her poetry appears in Room, Canthius, SAD Mag, and PRISM International, among others. Her poetry will be published in the upcoming autumn issue 289 of The Fiddlehead. Find her on social media @pipagaopoetry.
The Fiddlehead's 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest is now open for submissions and we're excited to announce that Selina Boan, Matthew Gwathmey and Susan Musgrave are the talented poets who will be judging this year's entries!
As we receieve submissions for the upcoming BIPOC Solidarities special issue, we'll be featuring our wonderful team of editors who are working to bring the issue together.
This special issue is meant as an opening, extending the invitation to BIPOC writers to transform the content and spirit of The Fiddlehead far beyond a single issue; this issue is a commitment to transformation and accountability.