Issues

No. 227 Summer 2024

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Cover · Contents · Book Reviews · Contributor Notes

Issue 227 cover art by Torkwase Dyson

Contents:

Cover
  • Torkwase Dyson
    Tuning (Hypershape, 101-310), 2018
    Gouache, ink, & pen on paper
    9" x 12"
    Private collection, courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Winner:
2024
Novella Prize

Poetry
  • Isha Camara, "Summer of '13, or All the Lil' Birdies on Jaybird Street Love to Hear the Robin Go Tweet Tweet Tweet"
  • Morgan Cross, "Imagine a Reckoning of Motherdom"
  • Daniela Elza with Brian Brett, "November Mysteries"
  • Nathan Erwin, "True Birth" and "Two Memories Accompanying a Drowning"
  • Wess Mongo Jolley, "Ater "The War"" and "No Answer"
  • Diane Louie, "Road Cut"
  • Raymond Luczak, "Speech Therapy That"
  • Eli Mushumanski, "The Hunters in Fall" and "No one's sad like a ten-year-old."
  • Lauren Peat, "Aubade at Olympic Station" and "40,000 Feet"
  • Aaron Rabinowitz, "Misc" and "Vultures"
  • Kyeren Regehr, "Lessons from Bewitched"
  • Vivek Sharma, "Kathmandu from My Backyard"
  • Saadi Youssef, "A Prince Crowned," "The Key," and "The Weatherwoman Sighs"
    translated by Khaled Mattawa

Fiction
  • Courtney Baird-Lew, "Absence"
  • Kaitlin Ruether, "A Language of Shrugs and Sparks"

Creative Nonfiction
  • Kevin MacDonell, "Tug of War"

Reviews
  • Poetry

  • Sarah Burgoyne and Vi Khi Nao, Mechanophilia: Book 1
    (Vancouver: Anvil, 2023)
    and
    Natalie Hanna, lisan al'asfour
    (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2022)
    (Both reviewed by Lillian Liao)

    E. McGregor, What Fills Your House Like Smoke
    (Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2024)
    (Reviewed by Rosalie Morris)

    Bradley Peters, Sonnets from a Cell
    (Kingston: Brick Books, 2023)
    (Reviewed by D. Seabrook)

    Kerry Gilbert, Lady Bird
    (Holstein, ON: Exile Editions, 2023)
    (Reviewed by Yvonne Blomer)

    Chantal Neveu, you, translated by Erín Moure
    (Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2024)
    (Reviewed by Jake Kennedy)

    Fiction

  • Lauren Carter, Places Like These: Stories
    (Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2023)
    (Reviewed by Michelle Hardy)

  • Nonfiction

  • Cole Nowicki, Laser Quit Smoking Massage
    (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2024)
    (Reviewed by Joe Enns)

  • Mentionables

  • Sonja Swift, Echo Loba, Loba Echo: Of Wisdom, Wolves, and Women
    (Calgary: Rocky Mountain Books, 2023)

    Hannah Green, Xanax Cowboy
    (Toronto: Anansi, 2023)

    (Both reviewed by Book Reviews Editor Jay Ruzesky)

Contributor Notes
    COURTNEY BAIRD-LEW is a writer and editor in Montréal, QC, and a graduate of Concordia University’s Communication Studies and Creative Writing programs. She was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize.

    YVONNE BLOMER is a past Poet Laureate of Victoria, BC and was ARC Poetry’s 2022-2023 poet-in-residence. Her sixth book of poetry, Death of Persephone: A Murder, is forthcoming in 2024. She is preparing a third water-based poetry anthology.

    BRIAN BRETT (1950-2024) was a poet, memoirist, fiction writer, and journalist. His many books include the memoir Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life (2009).

    ISHA CAMARA is a Gambian-American poet and visual artist from South Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Southeast Review, MUZZLE Magazine, Hayden Ferry Review, and Lumiere Review.

    RYAN CANNON is a writer and film professor. His stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, and Narrative Magazine. He lives in Idaho.


    MORGAN CROSS is an acupuncturist, writer, and earth devotee. A descendant of European settlers on so-called Vancouver Island, she resides in Sc’ianew territory. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, PRISM International, Room Magazine, and more.

    TORKWASE DYSON is a painter who works across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. The cover image comes from a series of “hypershapes” shown in Chicago in 2018 as part of Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School. Her work has been widely exhibited in the US.

    DANIELA ELZA’s latest poetry collections are the broken boat (2020) and slow erosions (2020), a chapbook in collaboration with Arlene Ang. She is the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry.

    JOE ENNS is a writer, painter, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island. His poetry has been published in The Fiddlehead, FreeFall, and Dalhousie Review.

    NATHAN ERWIN is a land-based poet raised in northern Appalachia. A community organizer, Erwin currently operates with the Pocasset Pokanoket tribe as they fight for land, food, and seed sovereignty. His work has appeared in The Journal, North American Review, and Poetry Wales.

    MICHELLE HARDY is a freelance editor and book reviewer with a master’s degree in English and an editing certificate. A member of Editors Canada and the Editorial Freelancers Association, Michelle lives in Victoria, BC.

    WESS MONGO JOLLEY is a Canadian novelist and poet in Montreal, QC. He hosted the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel for ten years. His horror trilogy, The Last Handful of Clover, is available on various platforms. wessmongojolley.com

    JAKE KENNEDY, the author of several full-length collections of poetry, has recently edited and introduced John Lent’s selected poems (forthcoming in Fall 2024).

    LILLIAN LIAO is a writer based in Vancouver, BC.

    DIANE LOUIE’s book of prose poems, Fractal Shores, a winner of the National Poetry Series, was awarded the 2021 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. She lives with her partner, a research scientist, in Paris, France.

    RAYMOND LUCZAK is the author and editor of over thirty books, including A Quiet Foghorn: More Notes from a Deaf Gay Life (2022) and Far from Atlantis (2023). He lives in Minneapolis, MN.

    KHALED MATTAWA’s latest book of poems is Fugitive Atlas (2020). He is the William Wilhartz Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and editor-in-chief of Michigan Quarterly Review.

    KEVIN MACDONELL is a lifelong compulsive diarist who lives in Nova Scotia and writes about forgetting.

    ROSALIE MORRIS is a BC-based writer and editor with an MA in nineteenth-century literature. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Room Magazine, Vancouver Magazine, Heirloom Gardener, and on the occasional postcard.

    ELI MUSHUMANSKI, a queer writer living on unceded Ləʷəŋən territory, grew up in rural Northern BC. They were the City of Victoria’s Youth Poet Laureate in 2022. Eli’s work is published in Humber Literary Review, Plenitude Magazine, and elsewhere.

    LAUREN PEAT’s debut chapbook, Future Tense, will be published in Fall 2024. Her recent poems and translations have appeared in ARC Poetry, No Tokens, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry South, and World Literature Today.

    AARON RABINOWITZ writes poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. He has won PRISM International’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, Meridian’s Short Prose Prize, and CANSCAIP’s Writing for Children Competition.

    KYEREN REGEHR’s Cult Life was a finalist for the 2021 ReLit Awards and the Victoria Butler Book Prize; Disassembling a Dancer won the 2021 Raven Chapbooks Contest. She’s the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry.

    KAITLIN RUETHER’s work has appeared in Brick magazine, Plenitude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA. She currently lives in Toronto/Tkaronto, where she is working on a climate fiction novel.

    D. SEABROOK is a writer and critic based in Western Canada. A work in progress examines the inner life of a character with Borderline Personality Disorder™.

    VIVEK SHARMA, a first-generation immigrant-settler and BIPOC poet from Nepal, is a recent MFA graduate from the University of British Columbia. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Zaum Magazine, and Clackamas Literary Review.

    SAADI YOUSSEF (1934-2021), author of over forty books of poetry, two novels, a book of short stories, several books of essays, a memoir, and numerous works of translation (including Whitman, Cavafy, and Lorca), is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world. Born near Basra, Iraq, he spent the last two decades of his life in London.