Vera Hadzic, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery

 

CUBIC METRE OF INFINITY

after Michelangelo Pistoletto

This morning at the cemetery
a dead bird lay on the grass.
Half its throat, its globed rib cage,
and snappable bones exposed
to the elements. These animal corpses,
the kind you find beside the road
or on the lawn, are whistles
the wind blows into.
In the graves human bodies
do the same thing but unseen.
Turn into channels of air,
pathways for worms, infinite
things in an enclosed space.

I’d been eager to get my hands on Ottawa writer Vera Hadzic’s full-length poetry debut, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2025) [see her ‘six questions’ interview here; her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], produced as part of Stuart Ross’ imprint, A Feed Dog Book. Following her chapbook debut, Fossils You Can Swallow (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], the poems in Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (a stellar title, by the way) are expansive, and meditative; offering interesting rhythms and line-breaks across universes of intimate moments. As the title poem writes: “The single devotion to modern life is this: / keeping things inside yourself. This applies / to emotions, credit card details, urine, the impulse / to swear in front of children. Some of us are better / at this than others.”

Hadzic writes on art, history, literature, Benedictine monks, livestock, fish, Johnny Cash, death, snow, the internet, nail clippings and dead birds, etcetera; offering less a series of direct responses than incorporating ideas into her weave of far larger, more expansive tapestries of propulsive narrative thought. “The way flat fields / turn to gold hills / in waves.” she writes, as part of “OSSO BUCO,” “There is something I should be doing. // The heat in the chest, / the rising furnace / of the horse’s corpus; the crushing / of one’s own rib / cage; the horse on the ground, knowing, / or waiting.” Her poems are just so big, so precise; exact, even through and almost because of their expansiveness, attempting to navigate, articulate and investigate elements of the entire world of experience across her attention, wherever that might send her. “The monks communicate / by finger and wrist when / eating; a moving text of metacarpels,” she writes, as part of the poem “MONASTERIO DOS JERÓNIMOS,” “the major mechanism illumi- / nating the thin working page, / the palm. Boiled egg splits / gently under the tooth and lip. / No one can speak while / eating, and it’s just as well, / because no one will mention / the dark spot consuming / the wall. No one can speak / of it but the stone / animals, and they’ve sworn / silence.” There is something intriguing about how these poems float between poems and essays, poems and short stories, all seeking out ways to best understand her thinking across such vast distances.

There is, for example, the four-part narrative piece, “FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH,” a poem that reads a bit like a short story by Stuart Ross [see my essay on his most recent collection of short stories here], writing elements of surrealism, both swirling and propulsive across a huge mass of text. Here is but the opening of the five-page third section, “The Author,” that begins:

I once met Ernest Hemingway in Toronto. I was lost in the subway
and late for a concert. Ernest Hemingway was sitting in a coffee
house and writing clean, simple prose. This prose had periods
and precise words that were well-chosen and always sufficient.
It was both summer and winter, both rainy and snowy, and the heat
of the sun made sweat melt into my back and worm
like an excretable minnow back into my bloodstream, so that my
body was like the water cycle on a singular human scale, a tiny
microcosm that pumped out fluid and reabsorbed it almost instantly.
“How do you like Toronto, Hemingway?” I said Hemingway because
this is the way almost everybody refers to him, all the time. The first name
wastes syllables, when the last name is already an efficient synopsis
of all he wrote. I refuse to write William Shakespeare in my essays.
I want to cross out William when students write his full name in their
Essays. I want to write in the margins. Everybody knows who
Shakespeare is. Everybody knows who Hemingway is.
What’s the likelihood someone mixes him up with the wrong
Shakespeare? Oh, your reader might say upon reaching the sentence
where you mention Lear, oh, this is the Shakespeare who writes plays.
I mixed him up with the Shakespeare who sells mattresses. Or, I mixed
him up with his father who sold gloves. Or, I don’t want to read an essay
about the guy who wrote plays. I want to read an essay about a
mattress salesman who has the same name as a famous
playwright.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vera Hadzic

Vera Hadzic is a writer based on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, Ontario. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by Proper Tales Press in 2023. She has an Honours BA in English and history from the University of Ottawa, and an MA in English Literature from Queen’s University. Her first full-length book, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery, appeared from Anvil Press in fall 2025.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was the first time I got a sense that people I didn’t personally know were reading my work, and even owning physical copies of it. There was something very exciting about that, and because it was the first time I had taken a series of poems and worked on editing them into one collected thing, it motivated me to keep thinking about future collections. The same summer that the chapbook was out, I started thinking about my next project, which would become my most recent work, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery. There are definitely similar poems in both works, and similar experimentations with form and subject matter, but I think the tone of the collections as a whole is quite different.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? 

One of the first poems that I remember writing was a Halloween poem about a haunted house for an English assignment in elementary school. We got to open up a document in the computer room and the whole class could work on their poems; I remember that it felt very easy to write, in the sense that the words just kept coming. My experience with poetry has remained similar—either the words don’t come, and I don’t succeed in writing a good poem, or the words come, and I get something I like on the page.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? 

My writing initially comes pretty quickly, if I have an idea to run with. What takes longer is finding consistent time to keep writing, if it’s a longer project, or to edit, after I’ve gotten a first draft down. My first drafts often do look close to their final shape, with some exceptions. I find it hard to return to a piece after I’ve written it, so editing takes a strong surge of willpower, or an upcoming deadline (which is more common).

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

With my chapbook Fossils You Can Swallow, I didn’t intend any of those poems to make it into any kind of larger project until I was gathering them together and seeing how they fit together as a kind of miscellany. But with Several Small Animals, I was definitely working on a book project from the beginning. I actually had the title of the book before I had a single poem in it (including the poem which shares its title with the collection itself!). At the time, I was thinking through images of enclosed spaces like monasteries or convents, and of the ways that bodies are both enclosed and not, and how they can be put in these enclosures, too. It was a title that hit on all of that, and I wanted to keep building those throughlines and themes. For the next year or so, I wrote poems with an awareness of that, seeing what would fit into the manuscript and what wouldn’t.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings. I think I just love to stand in front of people and talk. A good reading makes me feel fulfilled; it satisfies something about me that loves to perform. Attending readings, just to hear others read, is also valuable to my process; if I haven’t been writing lately, hearing a good reading will make me want to.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? 

Right now I keep coming back to two interests that are related. One of them concerns the nature of poetry and of language as a whole. Why is it that poetry as an art form seeks to complicate rather than simplify? What does it mean when poetry fails—is poetry always a failed attempt to say something about the world? My other concern has to do with the body. How does the human body come together, exist, live, love, hurt, and come apart? I’m interested in the body as a kind of container, for emotions and fluids and organs, but also a failing container, one which inevitably lets things slip. In this way, how is it like language?

The “I” in my poems is not always me, but lately I have also been experimenting with writing work that is more personal, and which addresses some of my own psychological and physiological concerns, including anxiety and obsessive compulsions.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers help people feel invested in the world around them. It can be easy to develop a sense of apathy in our day-to-day lives, especially when living under the economic, social, political, and environmental conditions we are living in. It can be easy to feel like there are few individual actions we can take, or that those actions won’t matter in the face of large-scale climate disaster, fascism, genocide, and colonization. I think writers help us to be present. Even when we read books that take us out of our present reality, that are escapist or feel “light”, the act of reading and thinking helps us return to ourselves and remember how implicated we are in everything around us.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential! I’m often initially unsure about edits, but when I take some time away and return to the piece, I always see that they’re integral to getting the central idea of the poem across. Working with Stuart on Several Small Animals has been such a privilege and has really tightened the collection up in ways that I couldn’t imagine going in. One of my favourite poems in the collection was much weaker before Stuart pushed me to rework it; the final product is, I think, so much stronger than the original attempt, and I’m so grateful for the push from Stuart which got the poem to that point.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 

It’s not exactly a concrete piece of advice, but I encountered an idea that’s changed the way I see the world in Jennifer Baker’s course on poetics at the University of Ottawa, when we discussed what makes poetry different than prose. We talked about how poetry has a tendency to obscure what it wants to say. Thinking about what poetry does in the world—creates spaces that move toward meaning, but never quite just hands it to you—has improved my writing, but it has also enhanced the way I live in the world. Many things that are hard to understand feel like poetry, and understanding them in that way gets me closer to expressing what they mean to me.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
    
I have always written both poetry and fiction. I get an idea for a poem, or an idea for a short story, or sometimes an idea for a longer work of fiction, so I don’t usually consciously choose a genre; it’s already embedded in the idea itself. I find it hard to switch between projects in the same day or the same week, regardless of genres!

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wish I had a writing routine. I have sometimes tried to develop one. When I was on vacation last summer, I wrote a poem every day for three weeks. (Some of these poems ended up in my book, and others were just terrible.) This was great, but I couldn’t keep it up after I got home. Right now, I’m keeping a daily streak of winning at least one game of Spider Solitaire a day (I play on my phone). Unless I’m very inspired, it always takes a long time for me to start writing; I usually need to marinate before I start really thinking.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I’ve become better lately at not feeling guilty when I’m not writing. If the motivation isn’t there, it doesn’t make sense to force it. When I get stalled, I usually need to take time away from what I’m working on, or I can try to read something—anything—to get back into it. However, I’m often not very good at identifying that I’m stalled—I’ll spend hours trying to write which just turn into hours of procrastination. The trick is to turn to something else and let myself come back to the work from another direction. Engaging with language in another medium often makes me want to write again; if that doesn’t work, it just means it’s time to do something else, and wait for the motivation to come back.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

There’s a particular scent of laundry detergent that always reminds me of my family home in Ottawa, and also of my grandparents’ apartments in Belgrade. I once spent five minutes standing in a hallway somewhere on campus at Queen’s University because I could smell this extraordinarily nostalgic laundry smell at that exact spot.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes! Many of the poems in Several Small Animals are inspired by visual art. Some of them I wrote while sitting in art galleries. Sometimes I’m inspired by movement, especially contemporary dance—both by the images that movement and music evoke for me, and by the ways that dance teachers describe the body and its movement, which often leaks into my writing. Science is another important influence for me. I particularly gravitate (haha) towards writing about space, stars, and planetary bodies, largely because my academic work, studying astronomy and astrology in Renaissance plays, has me thinking a lot about the ways we imagine and investigate the universe.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I find myself to be a very porous writer, in that almost anything that I really enjoy reading will make me want to write in that style. In that sense, reading in general is essential for my work. Kathleen Graber is someone I turn to when I have big ideas about theory or history that I don’t know how to approach. Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing is one of my favourite novels, partly for the precision and delicacy of its language. Since I was in middle school, I have loved J.R.R. Tolkien, not just for the scope of his fantasy, but for the delicate and rich way he writes about his world and our world. I am compelled by writing which is lush, but also sharp.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Learn to surf!

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d like to work in museums or archives. I volunteered for a few years at a museum at the University of Ottawa, and it made me realize that that was a road I could have gone down.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I can’t remember what got me started—I just remember always doing it. My mother studied French literature at university, and I think her love of books and language has had a fair amount of influence. Everyone around me always seemed to accept that I could be a writer; I never felt the need to try anything else.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and am currently reading Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, which is excellent. I’m trying to carve out time to read uninterrupted. I just recently watched Sinners (2025)—it’s such a compelling film which just moves so quickly and powerfully through its story and its music. I loved it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m rewriting a science fiction novel that I have been working on, on and off, for years: it’s set in space, and is about ballet, cyborgs, and assassins. I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately, so it’s exciting to be working in prose again.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes, early May 2023: Vera Hadzic + Cindy Juyoung Ok,

May already? God sakes. But you saw the daily poems posted on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, yes? Our tenth annual list! If you go here, you can even see the full list with links of all the poems posted so far in the series, which is pretty cool. I mean, it is an awful lot.

Ottawa ON: It was good to finally see Ottawa poet Vera Hadzic’s [see my “six questions” interview with her here] debut chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow (Proper Tales Press, 2023), published recently through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press. There’s such a lovely clarity and unselfconsciousness to Hadzic’s lines, enough that one might end up following those lines to some unexpected and even dark places through a thread of surrealism. “The sound of your name on my tongue / is sweet and secret and swollen with / the crackling of syllables,” she writes, to open the poem “Your Name on My Tongue.” Offering poems as narrative-theses that accumulate from one point to another, there’s an interesting sense of Hadzic carefully feeling her way through form, with some poems feeling a bit of hesitation, while others, a kind of confident, subtle, stride. “The Atlantic is dtoo deep and salty / to drink, lady.” the poem “Atlantic Drainage” begins, “You are going / to hurt yourself. I am always hurting / myself.”

soup chicken

my sky is an overturned bowl
bowling is something I do when I’m desperate
desperate birds tuck in wings, torpedo windows
windows that haven’t been cleaned in ages
ages are numbers painted over in grease
grease gathers in the curve of the pan
pan, god of wilderness, sings into moss
moss grows like fur across the backs of my hands
hands I once dug with, unlike now
now I feel the slowness in my pulse
pulse, that’s what the sky does when it turns red
red like onions and warm orange soup
soup would be good right about now
now I’m hungry for a nice full bowl
a bowl of sky soup, maybe
maybe just chicken soup

Brooklyn NY: I recently received a copy of Cindy Juyoung Ok’s chapbook House Work (ugly duckling presse, 2023). I hadn’t heard her name prior, but a quick online search offers that she “is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize.” There’s a really propulsive and lovely flow to her lyrics, one that rolls along long threads through line breaks and commas and flow. As the opening poem “The Five Room Dance,” begins: “In our search for a proportionate address we leak / out of bed as you stretch your books and I mine / the frozen language for olding hands day by week. / I account for each siren and you count the hips to sigh // for with the seam of open borders.” Her linearity is anything but straightforward, through a wordplay that aims straight but turns and twists in delightful ways, offered as tweaks and tics, presenting such wonderful, subtle movement. “Tracing the yard,” the poem continues, “the lace of leaves as why I write. Why I, right, frown / your side affects, the cadence of the fact that stars: / a woman is a thing that absorbs.”

Her lines are searing, slippery; and her narratives offer a quickness that suggests phrases working to simply fly by until one meets you, as is her purpose, deliberately head-on. “My country is broken,” she offers, to open “Moss and Marigold,” “is estranged, is trying, we write, / as though there is such a material as a country, as / though the landlord doesn’t charge rent for life lived / outside the house. When it comes to survival there is no right // way but there’s no wrong way either. The country is / a construction, with each writing becomes more made.” Her poems have such an ease to them but strike with such incredible force. Oh, I think I am very much looking forward to seeing this full-length debut.