Issues

No. 219 Summer 2022


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Cover · Contents · Book Reviews · Contributor Notes

Issue 219 cover art by Jinny Yu

Contents:

Winner:
2022
Novella Prize
Poetry
  • Heo Nanseolheon, "Song of Scissors"
    translated by Suphil Lee Park
  • Lee Okbong, "From Dream Spirit"
    translated by Suphil Lee Park
  • K. R. Segriff, "Winter Walk with a Former Inmate"
  • Amy M. Alvarez, "Marriage Counselling: Lancaster, Pennsylvania"
  • Jes Battis , "Rose Names Herself," "Bubble Wrap," and "Tenderfoot"
  • Louie Leyson, "all my friends in a room listening to say it right by nelly furtado," "thank u rihanna part 2," and "killing flies in late september"
    Read an interview with Louie Leyson on their poetry.
  • Lauren Marshall, "Pandataria"
  • Kenneth Tanemura, "Ode to My Mother" and "Kid Sister"
  • Rose Henbest, "Cherry Blossoms"
  • Heather Birrell, "Kaput"  
  • Michael Kenyon, "whatchamacallit" and "Small Potatoes"
  • Jordan Mounteer, "Pacific Golden Chanterelle (Cantharellus formosus"
  • Meghan Kemp-Gee, "Taking" and "An Ending"
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
  • Jen Hirt, "This Is for the Camperdown Elm"
  • Daniel Allen Cox, "You Can't Blame Movers for Everything Broken"
Reviews

  • Poetry

  • AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poets,
    edited by A. Gregory Frankson 
    (Gatineau: Renaissance, 2022)
    (Reviewed by Paul Watkins)

    Diane Tucker, Nostalgia for Moving Parts
    (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Claire Majors)

    Fiction

  • Leah Ranada, The Cine Star Salon  
    (Edmonton: NeWest, 2021)
    (Reviewed by L'Amour Lisik)

  • Lee Gowan, The Beautiful Place 
    (Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Carol Matthews)

  • Nonfiction

  • Tomson Highway, Permanent Astonishment
    (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Sally Carpentier)

  • Helen Humphreys, Field Study: Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium  
    (Toronto: ECW, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Marlene Cookshaw)

  • Mentionables

  • Steven Heighton, Selected Poems 1983-2020
    (Toronto: Anansi, 2021)

    Me Tomorrow: Indigenous Voices on the Future,
    edited by Drew Hayden Taylor
    (Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2021)

    Sarah Mintz, Handwringers
    (Regina: Radiant, 2021)

    Best Canadian Poetry 2021,
    edited by Souvankham Thammavongsa
    (Windsor, Biblioasis, 2021)

    (All reviewed by Book Reviews Editor Jay Ruzesky)

Cover
  • Jinny Yu, why does its lock fit my key?, 2018
    Oil on aluminum
  • 132 cm x 101.6 cm
  • Collection of the artist
  • Photograph: Richard-Max Tremblay
Contributor Notes
    AMY M. ALVAREZ is a Black Latinx poet, educator, and scholar. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She teaches English at West Virginia University.

    JES BATTIS     teaches literature and creative writing at U of Regina. They’ve published poetry in The Capilano Review, The Puritan Review, and Poetry is Dead, among other venues. They’re also the author of the Occult Special Investigator series, Parallel Parks series, and the upcoming mystery/urban fantasy novel The Winter Knight.

    HEATHER BIRRELL     is the author of a collection of poetry, Float and Scurry, which won the 2020 Gerald Lampert Award, and two story collections, Mad Hope and I know you are but what am I?. She lives in Toronto.

    SALLY CARPENTIER     teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island University. She has been an editor for The Year’s Work in English Studies, co-directed the Cowichan Innovation Lab, and is working with Penelakut Elder Florence James on an audio archive for students of Hul’q’umi’num’.

    MARLENE COOKSHAW     has published five collections of poems, most recently Mowing (2019) and Lunar Drift (2005). She lives on a small farm on Pender Island, BC.

    MARTHA NELL COOLEY     is a writer, filmmaker, and cultural worker based in Kijipuktuk/Halifax, NS.

    DANIEL ALLEN COX    ’s essays appear in Maisonneuve, The Florida Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He is the author of four novels published by Arsenal Pulp Press, and a memoir-in-essays to be published in 2023. He lives in Tiotia:ke/Montréal. Twitter: @danielallencox

    JENNY FERGUSON     is Métis and white, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and Creative Writing. She believes writing, teaching, and beading are political acts. Her debut novel, Border Markers, appeared in 2016, and her debut YA novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, has just been published. She will start this fall as an Assistant Professor in English at Coe College, teaching creative writing.

    ROSE HENBEST     lives and studies in Fredericton, NB. She writes poetry, drinks tea, and dances alone in her tiny kitchen to Tina Turner’s “The Best.” It’s hard to say just how much she loves people. And books.

    JEN HIRT     is a creative nonfiction writer from Pennsylvania. An author of three books and editor of two anthologies, she has had her work mentioned in the Notable Essays of Best American Essays. She is Editor of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies.

    MEGHAN KEMP-GEE     lives somewhere between Vancouver, BC and Fredericton, NB. She writes poetry, comics, and scripts of all kinds. Her debut poetry collection, The Animal in the Room, is forthcoming in spring 2023. Twitter: @MadMollGreen

    MICHAEL KENYON has been employed as a seaman, a diver, and a taxidriver. He now works as a freelance editor and a therapist and lives in Victoria. During the time of COVID-19 he walked the streets of Greater Victoria solo, and one day met a dog called Morris and came upon a poem painted on a fence.

    LOUIE LEYSON     is a Filipina poet and UBC graduate who lives on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. You can find their work in Nat. Brut, One, and others.

    L’AMOUR LISIK     is a queer writer and artist of Mauritian-Chinese/Scottish settler descent. She works as an associate prose editor for Plenitude Magazine as well as Managing Editor for The Malahat Review.

    CLAIRE MAJORS     edits for poets, performance artists, neuropsychiatrists, and FOLKLIFE magazine and works as a Hansard editor at the BC Legislative Assembly. Recreationally, she is a writer, painter, dancer, French teacher, beekeeper, banjo player, and professional development co-chair for Editors BC. clairemajors.com

    LAUREN MARSHALL     holds a BA in Creative Writing and Political Science from UBC Okanagan and Juris Doctor from the Peter A. Allard School of Law. Her poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The McNeese Review, and The Puritan. She currently works as an articled law student in Vancouver.

    CAROL MATTHEWS     lives in Nanaimo, BC.

    JORDAN MOUNTEER    ’s poems have appeared in Canadian and American publications; his first book, liminal, appeared in 2017. He’s a visitor on Sinixt tum’xula7xw, where he lives and works as a mental health and addictions counsellor.

    SUPHIL LEE PARK    ’s poetry collection, Present Tense Complex, won the 2021 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize and her story “Séance” won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. She holds an MFA in Poetry from U of Texas at Austin. Born and raised in South Korea, she now lives in the United States. suphil-lee-park.com

    K. R. SEGRIFF     is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker. Her work has appeared in Greensboro Review, PRISM International, and Prairie Fire, among others. She is working on her debut poetry collection.

    KENNETH TANEMURA     lives and writes in Mississauga, ON.

    PAUL WATKINS     is Professor of English at Vancouver Island University. His creative and academic work focuses on intersections between improvisation, poetry, and sound.

    JINNY YU    ’s work grows out of an inquiry into the medium of painting, as a means of trying to understand the world around us. A transnational artist, she lives and works on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinàbe Nation.