"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 —
"Recurrent"
If the river stood still it would
become a mountain.
Built on the backs of mallards
and trout. Their bodies etched
in stone; we dig them out
and blow the dust off. Rebuild
their existence in code, digital preening,
virtually nesting in the shade by the bushes,
gliding on invisible currents we transmit
to one another every moment of our lives.
We cut it back for aesthetics, but
it will always grow. We always come back
"The Day After the Best Before"
By Colin Johnson
Matthew Hollett’s poem “The Day After the Best Before” has won The Fiddlehead’s 2018 Literary Contest Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. This interview was conducted over e-mail by Editorial Assistant Colin Johnson in the first weeks of March 2018 and has been edited for clarity.
Charming character turns creep, bug-eyed
he assesses her strange when she opens
her mouth. She
is elsewhere, an ace-
shaped arrowhead spearing towards her,
By Corinne Shriver Wasilewski
The New Brunswick Book Awards ceremony was held at Memorial Hall at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton on May 24th. It was a wonderful ceremony with music provided by Jane Simpson and Gerard Collins. Colleen Kitts-Goguen emceed the event and David Adams Richards provided an inspiring and moving keynote speech.
By Ross Leckie, Editor.
I first came to the poetry of Norman Dubie as a student lurking in second-hand bookstores, finding bedraggled copies of his books, and taking them home with me. Well, I did pay for them, and then they paid me back. “These poems are as simple as ice,” I thought. Then I thought, “These poems are as damned complicated as ice. Slippery too.” If the devil is in the details, then so are the many gods of the living and the dead, and how we speak to them.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poem "Fabric" won the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem as part of The Fiddlehead's 26 annual literary contest. You can read an interview with Bernier-Cormier here.
Fabric
October 31st, 2016
By Jenna Albert
Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poems have recently appeared in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, and Poetry is Dead, and won honourable mentions in CV2's Young Buck Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2016. His first chapbook, Englishing, will be published this spring by Frog Hollow Press.
Editorial Assistant Jenna Albert conducted this interview by email in mid-March.
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Jenna Albert: First of all, congratulations on winning the 26th Annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest. You must be ecstatic!
