Dan O’Brien is a poet and playwright. His poetry collections include Our Cancers, War Reporter, New Life, and Scarsdale. O’Brien is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. His work has been published in several issue of The Fiddlehead, most recently in issue 283 (Spring 2020). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
Kevin Irie was part of Poem in Your Pocket Day 2020. His book, Viewing Tom Thomson, A Minority Report (Frontenac House 2012), was a finalist for The Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and The Toronto Book Award. His new book is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). His poetry is featured in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead.
Sam Cheuk is a Hong Kong-born Canadian poet and author of Love Figures (Insomniac Press, 2011), Deus et Machina (Baseline Press, 2017) and Postscripts from a City Burning (Palimpsest Press, 2021) on the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and its aftermath. #StandWithHongKong #香港人加油 #MilkTeaAlliance. Sam's poems are featured in issue 289 (Autumn 2021) of The Fiddlehead.
A playlist of cozy poems for fall by editorial assistants Meghan Kemp-Gee and Rosemary Henbest.
Editorial Assistant Rose Henbest's interview with Richard-Yves Sitoski about his poem “Things that Don’t Show up in Photos” from the new Autumn issue.
Rose Henbest: I always appreciate art inspired by ignored moments, as you point to in your title. Can you talk about your inspiration for this poem, for wanting to capture such a moment?
Richard-Yves Sitoski is a songwriter, performance poet and the 2019-2022 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario. His most recent book is the multimedia poetry collection, No Sleep ‘til Eden (Ginger Press, 2020), which features augmented reality. His poetry will be featured in the upcoming Autumn issue of The Fiddlehead.
Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon!
Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon!
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.
