Issues

No. 214 Spring 2021


Cover · Contents · Book Reviews · Contributor Notes

Issue 214 cover art by Marigold Santos

Contents:

Winners:
2021
Open Season Awards

Poetry
  • Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, "A manifesto of the seasons" and "Solitude," translated from the Farsi by Khashayar Mohammadi
    ***The original poems in Farsi were accidentally printed incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error and will reprint the poems in our summer issue 215.***
  • Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, "Thaw," "Circadian Rain," and "Lessons in Southern Water Cycles"
    Read an interview with Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin on her poems.
  • Matt Robinson, "Counterpoints"
  • George Bowering, "Wendy Stevens in 1990"
  • Leslie Joy Ahenda, "Venus," "even the knifefish learns to flee," and "to outlast an active volcano"
    Read an interview with Leslie Joy Ahenda on her poems.
  • Barbara Pelman, "How Do You Pronounce Covid"
  • Manahil Bandukwala, "over hand over" and "Even at its most difficult"
  • Sophie Crocker, "two rats living in a raccoon's corpse discuss structural brutalism"
  • Bryce Warnes, "Many I Went to High School with Are Now Successful Sole Proprietors" and "White Chanterelles"
  • Kari Teicher, "poppy"
  • Tia Paul-Louis, "Grown Woman Gone," "Cheers," and "Too Gone"
  • Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, "Tonight, Daddy Almost Dies Again" and "What Is Left To Cling To"
  • Hussain Ahmed, "Prayer," "Khalwa with the Songbird of Wassoulou," and "Cure"
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
  • Kelly Norah Drukker, "Souls"
Reviews
Cover
  • Marigold Santos, shroud envisioning (sampalok in strata), 2020
    Acrylic, pigment, gesso on canvas
  • 60 in. x 40 in.
  • Courtesy of the artist and Jarvis Hall Gallery
Contributor Notes

    KARA ABDOLMALEKI is a writer, translator, and researcher in literature and film studies, focussing on intellectual dissent in Iran between the 1953 Coup and the 1979 Revolution. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Iranian Studies, Film International, Parsagon, and The Guardian.

    LESLIE JOY AHENDA is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and the poetry editor for Augur Magazine. Her work has appeared in CV2, filling Station, Plenitude Magazine, and more. Her debut chapbook, Threnody for a Drowned Girl, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 with Moon Jelly House.

    HUSSAIN AHMED is a Nigerian writer whose poems are featured or forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Transition Magazine, and Magma.

    MANAHIL BANDUKWALA is a Pakistani writer and artist. Her most recent project, "Reth aur Reghistan," is an exploration of Pakistani folklore interpreted through poetry and sculpture. She is a member of VII, an Ottawa-based collaborative writing collective.

    JOHANNAH BIRD is a PhD candidate in English at McMaster University, studying Indigenous literatures. She has spent much of her life in the prairies but currently resides in Hamilton. Her research interests include early Indigenous literatures in English, life writing, and poetry. She is a member of Peguis First Nation.

    GEORGE BOWERING was born in Penticton, BC, and is the author of more than a hundred books. His most recent books are Soft Zipper (New Star, 2021) and Taking Measures (Talonbooks, 2019).

    C.P. BOYKO, the author of four collections of fiction, lives and writes in Vancouver, and online at cpboyko.com.

    SOPHIE CROCKER is a writer and performer based on unceded Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ land. Their previous and forthcoming publications can be found in The Fiddlehead, The Common, CV2, Room Magazine, Plenitude, The Nashville Review, Homology Lit, and elsewhere.

    JAMIE DOPP is Associate Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Victoria and the author of four books and co-editor of two others. With Angie Abdou, he co-edited Writing the Body in Motion (2018). His second novel, Driving Lessons, appeared in 2020.

    KELLY NORAH DRUKKER is a Montreal-based writer. Her award-winning poetry collection, Small Fires, was published in 2016, and a French-language translation, Petits feux, appeared in 2018. Kelly's nonfiction has been shortlisted for the 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She is currently at work on her doctorate through Concordia University's interdisciplinary Humanities program.

    BILL GASTON's latest book is the memoir Just Let Me Look at You (Penguin, 2018), and previous fiction collection A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage (Douglas & MacIntyre, 2017). He lives and writes on Gabriola Island in the Salish Sea.

    MATTHEW HOLLETT
    is a poet and photographer recently transplanted from St. John's to Tiotia:ke/Montreal. His first book, Album Rock, was published in 2018.

    ZILLA JONES is an African-Canadian criminal defence lawyer, anti-racism educator, mother, singer, and writer from Winnipeg. She has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize, the Writers Union of Canada short prose competition, and The Fiddlehead fiction contest, and won Honourable Mention in the Room Magazine fiction contest.

    TANIS MACDONALD is the author of a memoir in essays, Out of Line, and four books of poetry. Her nonfiction appears in the anthologies Against Death and Far Villages. She lives in Waterloo, ON, and teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University.

    SAEED TAVANAEE MARVI is a poet born in the city of Mashhad in 1983. His books include The Woman With Chlorophylic Eyes.

    NGWATILO MAWIYOO is a Kenyan writer and filmmaker. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Room, PRISM International, and elsewhere.

    HEATHER MILNE is the author of Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. She is the editor of Social Poesis: The Poetry of Rachel Zolf and co-editor of Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics. She teaches at the University of Winnipeg.

    KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI is an Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet and translator. His debut poetry collection Me, You, Then Snow is out with Gordon Hill Press.

    RHONDA MULLINS is a six-time finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation, winning the award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Twenty-One Cardinals. She is based in Montreal.

    RHIANNON NG CHENG HIN is a Mauritian poet living in Quebec.Her work has previously appeared in journals such as PRISM International, Arc Poetry Magazine, Gutter, and Jam & Sand. She is currently completing her debut poetry collection.

    TIA PAUL-LOUIS began experimenting with songwriting, then felt a deeper connection with poetry during her early teens which led her to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing in 2014. Paul-Louis's themes portray family, gender role controversies, mental health, and spiritual values.

    BARBARA PELMAN has three published books of poetry: One Stone (Ekstasis Editions, 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press, 2008), and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press, 2017), and four chapbooks.

    KAIT PINDER is an Assistant Professor at Acadia University, where she researches Canadian modernist fiction and literary theory.

    EMILY RIDDLE is nehiyaw from the Alexander First Nation in Treaty 6. She has been published in Room, The Globe and Mail, Teen Vogue, Canadian Art, and others.

    MATT ROBINSON's newest poetry collection, his sixth, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in fall 2021. He lives in Halifax, NS with his family, and plays a fair bit of beer league hockey.

    MARIGOLD SANTOS pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice, which explores self­hoods that embrace multiplicity, fragmentation, and empowerment, as informed by experiences of diaspora. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. She exhibits across Canada, and lives and works in Mohkinstsis/Calgary.

    JEANNE SHOEMAKER graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2010. She won the 2013 Pushcart Prize for her story, "Sonny Criss." Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, The Iowa Review, Full Grown People, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She lives in Victoria, BC.

    BILL STENSON is a fiction writer living in Cowichan Valley, BC.

    KARI TEICHER writes fiction and poetry. Read her work in PRISM, Event, Room, Puritan, and elsewhere. She's been longlisted, shortlisted, or something-listed for prizes at CBC, CV2, Fiddlehead, Room and others. She lives in Toronto.

    KARINA VERNON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020) and a forthcoming companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives.

    ANDAR WÄRJE is a queer and trans writer from rural interior BC. His work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, Room, CV2, carte blanche, Event, and other Canadian journals and anthologies. He has designed writing courses for UBC.

    Poems by BRYCE WARNES have appeared in PRISM, Poetry is Dead, and Train. He lives with his family on Vancouver Island in Quw'utsun territory.