11/21/2020 POETRY: JEN CURRINDEAR PRINCE OF MELTING ICECAPS, Bliss has escaped me. I went down to our beaches. The oil-sheened, the skinless salmon, the dead algae, the greasy rocks. We are in a state. A State. The moist bliss empty, the air chemical. The rat on the roof (the political). The call was internal, societal-- I stood up from a gold chair in the dank back room of a bank; you climbed out from under thousands of pennies piled in a cellar. We were recently human, we endeavoured to cycle, we wanted to juggle, we had only just learned how to play. The State blew out our candles and we were in a gorgeous dark, directing foot and bike traffic to the bridge. I have ten headlamps, community, and you have this hunch we might get along, get along. The sea coughs up cell phones as we build our boats. A kind rat with a human face helps me carve the oars. I vaguely remember a polar bear's story, the fluff of myth. Is it the red sky or the sea? We hesitate. Jen Currin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes. She did her schooling at Bard College (B.A.), Arizona State (M.F.A.) and Simon Fraser University (M.A.). She lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories (New Westminster, Surrey, and Vancouver, B.C.), where she teaches in the Creative Writing and ACP Departments at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Jen’s first collection of stories, Hider/Seeker (Anvil Press, 2018), was one of The Globe and Mail‘s top 100 books of 2018. She has also published four collections of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil Press, 2005); Hagiography (Coach House, 2008); The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (B.C. Book Prizes), the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and the ReLit Award; and School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 ReLit Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Her chapbook The Ends was published by Nomados in 2013. Jen was a member of the editorial collective for The Enpipe Line: 70,000 Kilometers of Poetry Produced in Resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline Proposal (Creekstone Press, 2012). 11/21/2020 POETRY: DAVID BARRICKDRONES Debris skirting breakers for miles – tub ring murk, shells suckered to trash and kelp like surf store necklaces. Grand Bend backwash. Scolded not to wade, children wearing bucket hats fill cups with mussel remains, raising each lumpy haul to the sun, the glint of marble shards. Toss them back in with a plop. By the docks, suburban fishermen curse the clear water driving walleyes deeper. Muttering about the crowds, rip cording their motor boats, spraying white fans against the waves. Under the pier, a teen wings in his drone to film locals with paint scrapers stripping shells from wooden legs. They yell get lost. He calls back it’s footage for a school project on damage from invasive species. David Barrick’s poetry appears in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, and other literary magazines. He teaches creative writing at Western University and is Co-Director of the Poetry London reading series. His first chapbook, Incubation Chamber, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019.
11/6/2020 POETRY: MALLORY SMITH OBLIVION A Response to Don McKay Not no thing, but our fear of obliteration treats naming as an end. What species can conceive of nothingness? Shield moraines pines beechleaves magpies honeybees snowfleas cells do not tolerate a void. Man might be the unintended side-effect, the by-product of nature, since humans sense absence, which does not exist. The air, no longer a divine canopy, still teems with molecules, chemicals, atoms, and yet, man persists in declaring nothingness. This is a lonely species. Perhaps the origins of dwellings, man sectioning himself off, started with the walls of his body filled with isolation where there is none. Perhaps he believes he has the right to name the space between things, can perceive the end of all things. He precepts and nothing is worth his preconceived notice; he notices nothingness and does not see anything of note. But his species dies, man ceases, and the death rattle betrays that he does not know what nothing he will be. Mallory Smith is a Creative Writing and English PhD candidate here at the University of Calgary, and the current Artist in Residence to the Cumming School of Medicine. Her thesis poetry collection, Smutty Alchemy, looks at the re-telling of scientific information in verse, materiality, and the work of the 17th century philospher, scientist, and writer Margaret Cavendish. She has interests in photography, recipe making, canoeing, theatre, gardening, and bookbinding.
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