Haunts and Holy F*** Moments: Grace Kwan’s The Sacred Heart Motel
In The Sacred Heart Motel, Kwan skillfully presents a literal image and makes a connection to an emotion or feeling.| 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 won the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2, and was nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award. His poems appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2024 and elsewhere. His chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea is available from Anstruther Press. [provided for the…| 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
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
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
