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December 21, 2021"I Did Not Choose to Become a Poet" Nduka Otiono on Ghost Writing Love Letters, Negotiating with Poems, & More
DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, edited by Peter Midgley with an afterword by Chris Dunton) gathers powerhouse poems from one of Canada's most insightful and timely ...
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September 25, 2019"Intimacy Was a Lost Country" Billy-Ray Belcourt on His Origin Story & Reading Like His Life Depends on It
In 2017, Billy-Ray Belcourt took the poetry world by storm with his debut collection, This World is a Wound. It went on to win the 2018 Griffin Prize (amongst many other honours), making Belcourt the ...
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September 30, 2019"When I Write Poetry, I Feel Limitless and Free" Hasan Namir, author of War / Torn, on Process & Poetry
Hasan Namir's debut collection, War / Torn (Book*hug), was one of the most buzzed-about books of poetry in the spring 2019 season for good reason; Namir's lucid, visceral examination of masculinity ...
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February 06, 2014Profile: Oni the Haitian Sensatian
With questions about the current place of the African-Canadian/Black writer, I reached out to a number of poets in the community for their expertise. The first -- Oni the Haitian Sensation.Oni the Haitian ...
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June 21, 2018"The Poet’s Responsibility is to His or Her Poem" Darren Bifford on Poetry Culture & Community
Darren Bifford's False Spring (Brick Books) is devastatingly timely, concerned as it is with the concept of collapse and cultural crisis. Tough, urgent, and unabashed, the poems in the collection push ...
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July 12, 2018"Here Might Be a Path Out of Myself" Steve McOrmond on Discovering Poetry
Steve McOrmond's Reckon (Brick Books) is his first book since the widely-praised The Good News About Armageddon was published in 2010. Reckon is worth the wait, packed with poems that balance wit ...
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July 10, 2019Susan Buis, Poets & Author of Gatecrasher, on What Can Be Done with Words
Self, land, ownership - as our understanding of these concepts because to evolve and grow, we find ourselves making new connections and relationships. In Susan Buis' Gatecrasher (Invisible Publishing), ...
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April 26, 2019Poet Ayaz Pirani on Oral Tradition, Literary Gatekeepers, and Writing Faithful Lines
Ayaz Pirani's work has been praised as "wise... surprising [and] sly" and his newest collection, Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Mawenzi House), builds on his characteristic insightful, elegant ...
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September 05, 2018Julie Bruck on the Beauty of Found Sources, Poems with Long Tails, & the Best and Worst Things About Being a Poet
Who says it's impossible to be serious and hilarious at the same time? Julie Bruck proves that it can be done with her daring, inventive, witty, and gutsy How to Avoid Huge Ships (Brick Books), a collection ...
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May 26, 2021"Mysteries and Tensions and Splinters of Awe" Poet Michael Lithgow on Craft, Inspiration, & Great Reads
Behind the facade of comfort or beauty lurk questions and uncertainties — the things we're not only unsure if we know, but if we want to know. Such is the tension of Michael Lithgow's haunting second ...