poetry

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.

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. 

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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This past weekend, Fiddlehead contributor Doyali Islam was on CBC's Sunday Morning talkiing with Michael Enright about "her childhood, the role of poetry in political resistance, and why she became a practitioner of parkour." As part of the discussion, she read "poem for your pocket," which we published last Autumn (The Fiddlehead, no. 269)! 

You can listen to the interview here!

By Rachel Rose

Three writers: Birgül Oğuz, Karen Villeda, and Betsy Warland. Three different countries: Turkey, Mexico, Canada. Each writer grapples with gender and identity, with loss, with the limits of language, with persistence against the conspiracies of silence, with responding to violence as part of the quotidian, as part of civilian life. On the surface these writers appear to have little in common, and yet their answers, though written separately and thousands of miles apart, seem part of the same conversation.