Arc Poetry - Book*hug Press
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In a conversation with Lisa Robertson, (hosted by BookThug and viewable online), Aisha Sasha John observes that an octopus can see with its skin. Tiny organs in the skin of an octopus, disconnected from the brain or eye, swell in response to light, sending waves of colour across the skin’s…| Arc Poetry
Emma Healey. Stereoblind. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2018. I have a confession to make. I dog-ear books I’m reviewing. Reading wherever I happen to be, I crisply fold and tuck a small triangle of the top or bottom of pages I may end up quoting or referencing. I know. I’m…| Arc Poetry
John Barton’s books include Polari, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, and, most recently, Lost Family: A Memoir (sonnets), a nominee for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize, and The Essential Derk…| Arc Poetry
...Fiddlehead. A graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, she is a Banff Centre Literary Arts alumna. Catch her on Twitter or Instagram at @cat_writes_604 or at www.catherinewriter.com....| Arc Poetry
Catherine St. Denis is the winner of The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Fiction. She placed in Grain’s Hybrid Forms Contest, was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was twice a finalist for PEN Canada’s New Voices Award. Her work is featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.| Arc Poetry
The poems in this first collection offer convincing evidence for the old saying “two heads are better than one.” Twice the range of knowledge, passion, humour, and imagination results in a daring book with dazzling imagery and language that titillates the eye, ear, and mouth, and the dictionary-seeking hand. MA|DE comprises Mark Laliberte and Jade […]| Arc Poetry
In Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, a Public Humanities Prison Arts Project, editor Elizabeth Effinger compiles an innovative collaborative project that adapts Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein into a long-form erasure project created by the Erasing Frankenstein Collective. The Collective is comprised of federally incarcerated women, University of New Brunswick students, and members of the Walls […]| Arc Poetry
Nina Berkhout mines the fodder of daily life for truths of the human condition, and offers them to us in her latest collection, The Great Wake. These are poems that at once bring a sense of mindfulness in the now, while highlighting the urgent reality of our mortality. Each of the book’s four parts touches […]| Arc Poetry
Andy Weaver’s The Loom is probably the best book of poetry I’ve read in a few years. Subtly meandering through, stacking up, and repeating several key motifs—most centrally parenthood—the book strikes that rare balance between incredibly strong poems and a unifying poetry-project conceit. Several themes and formal techniques stood out to me. The book begins […]| Arc Poetry
The format of the four seasons is an established one in the arts, from Vivaldi’s violin concerto to Alphonse Mucha’s Art Nouveau artistic posters. Cassidy McFadzean’s latest poetry collection, Crying Dress, is another rendition of this archetype but with some additional features. The seasons in Crying Dress are as temporal as they are affective, just […]| Arc Poetry
I roll the word party around in my mouth like an unripe rose hip. I take myself for a walk, find a cicada bunched up in what’s left of its skin. It crawls out mint green, pale pink, and leaves the shell of its own self behind, ghostly. Rose hips, too, I think are ghosts—although […]| Arc Poetry
Everyone has a bat story, but Aaron’s is the one that haunts me most. One night, his mother forgotthe sheets on the clothesline and they turned into moonlit caves, or marble eaves, or atticsfull of pearls—places darkness likes to perch— and three bats slept there, three lightbulbs of duskhanging from a white ceiling, until she […]| Arc Poetry
meadow curled at the edge of the bison field where wecaught bees in clear plastic cups—brought themto the man who painted their backs with nail polish & kept a running tally of their species, checked bumbled abdomens fleeced with pollen. wings kicking up prairie sky. galls swelled with heat & the foxgloves cracked open their […]| Arc Poetry
— for alwhere we can’t afford food and we can’t afford rentand the landlords complain to our ministers that our bloodis too thin to survive on and the ballcaps + mudflaps + rich lakehouse moms complain about the genitalsof children they will never meet and where the nazis are winning again in the comments sections+ […]| Arc Poetry
In Mari Ya’s foreword to PJ Thomas’ new collection of poetry, Drifting, she speaks eloquently of the way in which each poem beckons, asking the reader to find their heart within the pages. The hand of the poet becomes a direct, gestural movement toward its audience as shades of Mary Oliver evoke sentiments that speak […]| Arc Poetry
First a snag. Then it chokes and lodges itself inside my throat. Nose running, glasses fogging, chopsticks mid-wielding.| Arc Poetry
We feature poetry that is woozy, cunning, shearing and wildlike; and prose that offers new perspectives on the verse you thought you knew.| Arc Poetry
In The Sacred Heart Motel, Kwan skillfully presents a literal image and makes a connection to an emotion or feeling.| Arc Poetry
Where echoes of longing become a lifeline, Amanda Merpaw’s Most of All the Wanting is a poetic journey through grief and desire. Read more in this new review.| Arc Poetry
Amanda Earl is the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, a 21st Centry Anthology (Timglaset Editions, 2021). Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca. Her most recent poetry collection is Beast Body Epic (AngelHousePress, 2023). For more information, visit AmandaEarl.com.| Arc Poetry
Life is made up of endless quantities of fragments that light up our own personal auras like the stars in the night sky. Each star is a shining beacon of what it means to be alive: the people we meet, the joys and sorrows we encounter, the tragedies—not to mention…| Arc Poetry
Poetry editor for The Fiddlehead and inspirational instructor to many poets, Sharon McCartney, who currently lives in Victoria, B.C., is an icon of contemporary Canadian literature. She has published her poems in book form and her poetry has appeared in many publications; Villa Negativa: A Memoir in Verse is her…| Arc Poetry
A. A. Tremblay is a writer and photographer living in Ottawa, ON.| Arc Poetry
Joseph Kidney reads “Career Day” Career Day At Herbert Spencer Elementary, named for the man who coined survival of the fittest, one girl with a notepad, suspenders, a trilby, had WRITER written on a white HELLO MY NAME IS. The boys, who insensitive to pain often caused it, ran around…| Arc Poetry
Lisa Robertson's Boat may be considered part of a sequence or what is called a “stage,” a version of a print before it has reached its final form.| Arc Poetry
1. Find your entropic grudge pavilionthe driver’s vestiges, petrol and knuckle paint.take directions from a dark purpling branch.this way to the swamp rave. the salamander roller derby.mechanical rodeo for shrikes and barn swallows.tremble arenas raising hairs for luck. invite the zebra mussels,emerald ash borers, girls with missing front teeth.nobodies from…| Arc Poetry
The editing process of Maureen Hynes' poem "Wing On" is discussed in detail in this insightful article by John Barton.| Arc Poetry
Rob Taylor reads “Harrison River Valley, November” First the salmon are a smell, then a sound, then dorsal fins: a symphony of miniature Jaws fast cuts. Eagles gorge upon the living, seagulls tug apart the nearly dead. Our children stand transfixed. We offer them our meagre facts. A belly-up chinook…| Arc Poetry
My mother was born to a wayward tribe / of women whose hands were always / in the shooing motion| Arc Poetry
Andrea Scott reads “Saucer Magnolia” I marked my lost pregnancy and my last one, all in one shot.Out front I planted a sapling—magenta saucer magnolia—and, beside the root ball, the living baby’s placenta. The midwife said her husband wanted it out of their freezer, and sooner than later.My preteens played…| Arc Poetry
Clare Goulet’s first poetry collection, centered on the North American lichen, is a wonderful attempt at decoding etymological symbols through poetry.| Arc Poetry
Ellie Sawatzky reads “On Crete” Dad and I are sweet to each other, knowingMom’s not here to be our mediator. We’ve nevertraveled just the two of us. Every daydark clouds rove the olive groves outsideour Airbnb. The cold, chemical-bright surfaceof the pool jumps at the invasion of raindrops,raises helpless fists.…| Arc Poetry
Catherine St. Denis reads “The Essential Involvement of the Harpist” “Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” — Ursula Le GuinAs a child, I thought acid rain would…| Arc Poetry
Catapulted souls, the dead need obituary. Hollow musings, the dead take self- portraits. Unbidden ghosts, the dead chase hearses.| Arc Poetry
Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers is full of “strange women” behaving in ways that queer readers will find familiar.| Arc Poetry
Saemah Mushtaq, Catherine St. Denis, Rob Taylor, Cassandra Eliodor, Claudia Yang, Ellie Sawatzky, Georgio Russell, Andrea Scott, and Dominique Bernier-Cormier| Arc Poetry
you is a long poem written in French that uses the form of the polyhedron to represent the complexities and multi-faceted nature of love and relationships.| Arc Poetry
Erin Moure’s incredibly complex and beautiful poetry collection, Theophylline: A Poetic Migration transmits ideas of three American modernists.| Arc Poetry
Anne-Marie Turza's Fugue With Bedbug, offers instruction to the reader on how to approach the work, thinking of both the “fugue” and the “bedbug” as active notions in the form as well as the content of the poems.| Arc Poetry
This clear, concise collection of verse focuses on family, both past and present. The approach is clearly stated in the title poem of the book, “If I Were a River,” in which the author begins, “I’d flow between this world / and a parallel universe / where my departed dwell.” …| Arc Poetry
A Tour in the Garden of Earthly Delights by Damen O’Brien Pickup Fifty-Two by David Barrick Fulgura Frango (or How to Count to Infinity) by Dominique Bernier-Cormier Career Day by Joseph Kidney Telling the Bees by Larissa Andrusyshyn Nine Months, at 34 by Lianne O’Hara A Song, or Call by…| Arc Poetry
Dear Mahsa by Ava Fathi Of Eccentric Orbits by Jennifer Houle In Which Alberta Plays the Old West (Not So Much in the Way That Angela Hewitt Plays Bach as in the Way That a Dog Plays Dead) by Joseph Kidney The Bottle Depot by Tonya Lailey Bad Mango by…| Arc Poetry
It is often said that an essential quality of poetic writing is its immunity to translation. As Dante wrote in his Convivio: “nothing harmonized according to the rules of poetry can be translated from its native tongue into another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony.” Dominique Bernier-Cormier would, I…| Arc Poetry
Kim Fahner’s Emptying the Ocean is a feminist narrative modelled on Irish immram tales traditionally featuring men. Men in immram tales are often expelled from monastic communities for violent acts like rape or murder. Their chance at redemption comes through pilgrimage across the ocean to distant islands, whereas women banished…| Arc Poetry
