Issues

No. 220 Fall 2022


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Cover · Contents · Book Reviews · Contributor Notes

Issue 220 cover art by Rick Leong

Contents:

Winner:
2022
Far Horizons Award for Poetry

Poetry
  • Chelsea Coupal, "The Optometrist"
  • Joel Harris, "Ode to the Kiskadee" and "Canboulay Lives"
  • Ana Rodriguez Machado, "Año 57 de la Revolución"
  • Richard Sanger, "May 1968"
  • Susan Glickman , "Pourquoi je suis fatiguée"
  • Rachel Crummey, "Diary of a Body"
  • Ben Gallagher, "Prelude" and "From Below"
  • Shauna Andrews, "Special"
  • Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, "The Snake," "The air, then," and "Integrated Care Hub"
  • Read an interview with her on her poems.
  • A. Light Zachary, "Why bury yourself in this place you ask"
  • Manahil Bandukwala, "Jet Lag"
  • Tasos Leivaditis, "Honeymoon"
    translated by N. N. Trakakis
  • Annick MacAskill, "If I'm so real to you why do you call me only by pet names"
  • Carl Watts, "I Miss Not Dating"
  • Camille Lendor, "It's the little screams"
  • Jérémi Doucet, "Agartha" and "Aporia"
  • Erin Conway-Smith, "Veld sense"
  • Daniel W. K. Lee, "Dawn"
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
  • Gabriel Cholette, "My mom goes to a rave"
    translated by Brian O'Neill
  • Monica Wang, "Formosa Cranes"
Reviews
  • Poetry

  • Rhonda Batchelor, Allow Me: Poems 2000-2020
    (Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Donna Kane)

    Sue Sinclair, Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems 2000-2020
    (Fredericton: icehouse poetry, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Laura Ritland)

    Neil Surkan, Unbecoming
    (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Kevin Spenst)

    Fiction

  • Sydney Warner Brooman, The Pump
    (Toronto: Invisible Publishing, 2021)
    (Reviewed by Julie Paul)

  • Nonfiction

  • Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing, edited by Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina
    (Vancouver: Anvil, 2022)
    (Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven)

  • Mentionables

  • Emma Côté, Unrest
    (Vancouver: Anvil, 2022)

    Jon Claytor, Take the Long Way Home
    (Wolfville, NS: Conundrum Press, 2022)

    Sina Queyras, Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf
    (Toronto: Coach House, 2022)

    Julian Sancton, Madhouse at the End of the Earth
    (New York: Crown, 2021)

    (All reviewed by Book Reviews Editor Jay Ruzesky)

Cover
  • Rick Leong, Light Night, 2020
    Oil on canvas
  • 183 cm x 183 cm
  • Private Collection (image courtesy of the artist)
  • Photograph by Mike McLean
Contributor Notes
    SHAUNA ANDREWS, a freelance writer and editor with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, has been longlisted for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize and published in Portal Magazine and Incline. cowgirlgrammar.com Instagram: @cowgirl.grammar

    MANAHIL BANDUKWALA is from Karachi and currently lives in Mississauga. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (2022).

    GABRIEL CHOLETTE recently earned a doctorate in medieval French literature. His first book, Les carnets d’underground (2021), is now available in English translation as Scenes from the Underground (2022). Instagram: @gab.cho

    ERIN CONWAY-SMITH, born and raised in Thunder Bay, ON, is a journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, reporting most recently for The Economist and The Times (UK). She won the University of Toronto’s 2019 Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Twitter: @ejcs Instagram: @erinconwaysmith

    CHELSEA COUPAL’s first poetry collection, Sedley (2018), was shortlisted for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in more than a dozen Canadian publications, including Best Canadian Poetry. Instagram: @chelseacoupal

    RACHEL CRUMMEY, a visual artist and writer based in Tkaronto (Toronto), has been published in The Puritan, Maisonneuve, and The Capilano Review. She is currently working on a research project, “What Can Fungi Teach Us about Improvisation,” funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Instagram: @crum_crum_

    JÉRÉMI DOUCET is a Canadian fiction writer and poet. His work has appeared in CV2, Maisonneuve, Les Écrits, and several anthologies. He currently lives in Paris.

    BEN GALLAGHER lives in West Dublin, Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) with his wife and two children. He is a Zen practitioner with the Oak Tree in the Garden sangha. His first collection of poetry, A Grief Cave, was published in October 2022.

    SUSAN GLICKMAN’s most recent book is Artful Flight: Selected Essays 1985–2019. She is the author of seven books of poetry, four novels for adults, three novels for children, and a work of literary history. She lives in Toronto.

    JOEL HARRIS is a Trinidadian poet, artist, and editor. His poems are forthcoming in Poetry London and have been published in Door Is A Jar, Heavy Feather Review, PRISM International, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Anthropocene. Twitter: @JoelAnthonyHar3 Instagram:

    ZILLA JONES is an African‐Canadian writer, criminal defence lawyer, anti‐racism educator, singer, and mother, living on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, PRISM International, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Room, and The Black Lives Matter anthology of Nottingham Writers Studio. She has completed her first novel, The World So Wide, about the 1983 US invasion of Grenada. Twitter: @zilla_jones Instagram: @zilla.jones

    DONNA KANE’s poetry collection, Orrery, was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. Recent work has appeared in Scientific American and the anthol ogy Outer Space: 100 Poems. She divides her time between Rolla, BC on Treaty 8 Territory and Halifax, on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.


    RACHEL LACHMANSINGH is a Guyanese‐Canadian writer from Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Grain, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and a previous issue of The Malahat Review, among others. She was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and is currently pursuing her BA in creative writing. Twitter: @rachellwrites Instagram: @rachelxwrites

    DANIEL W. K. LEE (李華強) is a third-generation refugee, queer, Cantonese American born in Kuching, Malaysia. His debut collection of poetry, Anatomy of Want (2019), was published by QueerMojo/Rebel Satori Press. Daniel lives in New Orleans with this whippet Camden. www.danielwklee.com Twitter: @danielsaudade Instagram: @strongplum

    TASOS LEIVADITIS (1922–88), born and raised in Athens, was a literary critic and poet. His involvement as a youth in leftist politics led to his internment for more than three years in island prison camps. After his release in 1951 he eventually published twenty volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories. “Honeymoon” comes from his collection of prose‐poems, Night Visitor (1972), reflecting the dark years of military dictatorship in Greece (1967–74).

    CAMILLE LENDOR is a queer Black poet based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Canadian Literature, PRISM International, and Stellium Literary Magazine.

    RICK LEONG is a Victoria‐based artist who uses the language of the landscape to reflect on the ways that we move through and inhabit those landscapes we dwell in, and to explore how we connect to urban and wild ecologies.

    ANNICK MACASKILL is the author of No Meeting without Body (2018), a finalist for the J. M. Abraham Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Murmurations (2020), and Shadow Blight (2022). She lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. Twitter: @thisisannick

    BRIAN O’NEILL is a Montreal‐based writer and English language teacher. His poetry and prose have appeared in EVENT, Plenitude, and subTerrain. He has lived and taught in China and Mexico and has a master’s in Second Language Education from McGill University. Instagram: @bconeill Twitter: @brianconeill

    JULIE PAUL is the author of one poetry collection and three short fiction collections, including The Pull of the Moon (2014) and Meteorites (2019). She lives in Victoria, BC. Instagram: @juliepaulthewriter

    SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI’s fiction was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s 2022 Open Season Awards. Her poetry was shortlisted for the 2021 National Magazine Awards and the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. Her award‐winning first book is Port of Being (2018). She lives in Calgary and Vancouver and is at work on a novel and some tunes. Twitter: @Shazia_R

    LAURA RITLAND’s poetry collection East and West was shortlisted for the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. A previous winner of The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry, she currently lives in California, where she is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

    ANA RODRIGUEZ MACHADO is a writer in Toronto. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her poems have been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award and PEN Canada’s New Voices Award. anaro.ca Instagram: @anarodmac


    SUSAN SANFORD BLADES lives on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking people, the Xwsepsum/Kosapsum and Songhees Nations. Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

    RICHARD SANGER’s Dark Woods was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2018 by The New York Times. Fathers at Hockey, a chapbook, appeared in 2020. His new collection, Way to Go, is due out in spring 2023.

    KEVIN SPENST is the author of three poetry collections and over a dozen chapbooks with three more on the horizon. He lives in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil‐Waututh territory.

    N. N. TRAKAKIS teaches philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and also writes and translates poetry. His translations of Tasos Leivaditis’ work include Violets for a Season (2017), Autumn Manuscripts (2020), and Enchiridion Euthanasiæ (2021).

    SARAH YI-MEI TSIANG is the author of Grappling Hook (2022), Status Update (2013), which was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, and Sweet Devilry (2011), winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. She is the Creative Director for Poetry in Voice and the Poetry Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. Instagram: @sarah_yi_mei

    LYNNE VAN LUVEN is editor or co‐editor of as well as contributor to In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body (2012) and Nobody’s Mother (2006), Nobody’s Father (2008), and Somebody’s Child (2011). She lives in Victoria, BC.

    MONICA WANG has been published in Electric Lit, Southword, Augur, and Bureau Dispatch. She won The Sunlight Press’s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, she grew up in Taipei and Vancouver, and is now working on her first novel at the University of Exeter.

    CARL WATTS holds a PhD in English and currently teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He has published poetry, a short monograph, and a book of essays, I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago (2022). Twitter: @carl_a_watts Twitter: @carlalanwatts

    MERYEM YILDIZ is a poet, translator, and visual artist born and based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. She has contributed to various multidisciplinary events, literary magazines, and other publications in Canada and abroad. She holds a BA in psychology from McGill and a graduate diploma in translation from Concordia. Twitter: @tristia Instagram: @tristia

    A. LIGHT ZACHARY is the author of More Sure (forthcoming in 2023) and a former Lambda Literary Fellow. Also an autistic and queer human being, they live between Toronto and rural New Brunswick. Twitter: @alightupon