The Capilano Review issue 4.6 (spring 2026) : love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue

The texts and artworks in this issue come together within and across many of Roy’s varied communities: artistic, activist, academic, and Asian Canadian among all of these, considering subjects like asiancy, archives, and, crucially, Roy’s imperative to action as a few more principles within his astonishingly imaginative praxis. The alliterative synchronicity here all the while attempts to return readers to the materiality of language that roots Roy’s work. As Michael Barnholden, editor of Miki’s Flow: Poems Collected and New, affirms: “Roy’s first language was language.” (“Editor’s Note,” Emily Fedoruk and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross)

I’m very pleased to be able to go through the latest issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of the three fiftieth anniversary issues--3.46-3.48--here; my review of 3.41 here; my review of 3.34 here; my review of 3.33 here; my review of 3.32 here; my review of 3.31 here; my review of 3.30 here, etc], produced as “love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue,” celebrating the work and influence of the late Vancouver writer, teacher, activist, archivist and editor Roy Miki (1942-2024) [launching in Vancouver, by the by, on July 17]. As editors Emily Fedoruk and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross write as part of their introduction: “In circling the too-many possible places from which to ‘begin’ this note, we have often returned to the words of so many others who are forever moved and changed by Roy Miki.” They reference Phinder Dulai, for example, who offered this piece up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics not long after Miki died. Literary activity, or even cultural activity generally, seems so rarely acknowledged in Canada (only occurring, if at all, once someone retires or dies), so these moments of homage, especially in memoriam, become essential for any kind of creative ecosystem.

For those unaware of Miki’s literary output, specifically his poetry, you should pick up Flow: Poems Collected and New, edited by Michael Barnholden (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) [see my review of such here], a book of some six hundred pages, covering all five of his published poetry collections—saving face: poems selected, 1976-1988 (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), random access file (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), Surrender (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; Toronto ON: Mercury Press, 2001), There (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006) and Mannequin Rising (New Star Books, 2011)[see my review of such here]. certainly well known as an editor and critic, from his years of West Coast Line to a collection of essays, a bibliography of George Bowering and editing Roy K. Kiyooka’s posthumous selected poems [see my review of such here] and bpNichol's posthumous critical writings, Miki is perhaps still best known for his years fighting for and finally achieving redress from the Canadian federal government for the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. One can best describe his decades of writing, editing, activism and teaching as a community-based focus on questions about identity, citizenship, race, and place.

dear roy,

 

this break between our years

makes the arch of a bridge you ride

into vaporous clouds (“dear roy,” shō yamagushiku)

This special issue of The Capilano Review offers work by Michael Barnholden, Carolyn Nakagawa, Yoriko Guillard, Larissa Lai, Nicole Markotić, Cindy Mochizuki, Fred Wah, Yilin Wang, Echo Quan, Tiziana La Melia, Vivek Sharma, Gloriah Amondi, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Sena Cleave, shō yamagushiku, Wayde Compton, Daphne Marlatt, Rita Wong and Ranbir K Banwait, whether as direct tribute or response, or as indirect continuation of Miki’s decades of attention and labour. A play of language across language; a cross-section, that suggests and even explores further depths. The issue includes direct responses, but also pieces from those who might walk one of the many paths, so to speak, that Miki worked so hard to forge. Cindy Mochizuki, for example, provides “a textual and visual response” to Miki’s poem “Flow Nation,” from his collection, There. Larissa Lai offers “Rising Mist: Five Haibun for Roy” which are quite stunning (and hopefully part of an eventually-forthcoming collection, certainly). Wah offers some further lines of thoughtful lyric, of reminiscence, as does Nicole Markotić, providing an intimate detailing of Miki and Miki’s lyric in Winnipeg, upon first meeting him there. On his part, Wayde Compton provides the first part of an extended epic-in-progress, “Epistles to Oya: An Epic,” that stretches across an incredible canvas:

In the commander’s quarters, gathering
washing, she stopped, and her shape 

formed in the ornate lead-framing looking-
glass across the mantle: her self a 

stutter, a ripple in silver, foxed, a flash
of seeing; and in her cradling 

arm, swaddled warm, the worn
leather at her hip as she worked, the two 

oblong in the moment, together ahead
of missing, of breaking. And above 

his bed a painting, a flattery, this
commander, his eyes shadows, his face 

a simmer, a smear of power, at his neck
a chain, a locket on it, a spiral 

engraving of a ram’s horn there in
gold, a circling 

back upon itself. It hung
in paint as in life
covering his heart.

Echo Quan offers an intriguing sequence of text and photography, another form Miki had been exploring himself across a number of years. Translator and poet Yilin Wang offers three poems, the first of which, “mother tongue,” begins: “what is your mother tongue after you were / hoisted away from china at the age of four, and only // recovered the brushstrokes of your grandma;s name / by chance a decade later?” Highlights are almost too numerous to mention. I was also intrigued by the multiple pages of drawings, and again and again now that we know we know we know, by Sena Cleave, introduced with this short statement by the artist:

The curved lines in and again and again now that we know we know we know take after Roy Miki’s use of parenthesis in his poetic work. in poems like “Dome’s Story” and “The Fronds on Galiano,” I noticed how Miki would open parentheses without later closing them – sometimes opening multiple in a single poem – evoking a margin that continuously grows. Reflecting on Miki’s writing and activism (the latter of which he has described as a continuous process of change and negotiation) during the current rise in anti-migrant policies, I began drawing parentheses with coloured pencils, repeating and layering them until the parentheses took on a structural role in the composition, similar to how a stitch functions in embroidery, or how a row of thread functions in weaving. and again and again now that we know we know we know continues my inquiry into textiles, agriculture, and other repetitive forms of labour, using materials such as thread, fabric, and pine needles to think through themes of precarity, sustenance, and persistence.

Literature, I’ve heard it said, is less a continuous thread than a constellation of interconnected hubs, from which so much activity emerges, and Miki was one of those very important touchstones for multiple generations of writers, academics, readers and thinkers, well beyond his years teaching at Simon Fraser University (although a number of these contributors can be counted as some of Miki’s former students). As well, this is not the first special issue on Miki and his work, as the late journal that he founded, West Coast Line, produced a special issue, titled “Miki,” as issue #57 (42.1: spring/summer 2008), guest edited by Fred Wah [see my review of such here]. As Wah beings in his introduction to that issue, a consideration that could be equally applied to this current volume:

This issue of West Coast Line is a tribute to its founder, Roy Miki. It is not intended as collection of anecdotal or hagiographical testimonials but, rather, a collection of writing from some of the writers who have cohabited Roy’s extensive cultural community over the past 40 years. Writing was solicited to reflect not only the moment of production but also to reflect to Roy a partial sense of the threads of his own creative and intellectual milieu which he has generated through a lifetime of writing, thinking, and activism.

filling Station #84 : let slip the dogs

 

Hey America, How Are Your Stones?

Sometimes the bicycle swirl of a landscape unfurls hot
butter – edge – white – wax – smear – mushed 

into cloud          //          there’s a mountain out there

catches the eye even from a semi
barrel-rocket of goods boxed into a flare jean 

the urgency makes you solution-oriented

                        // 

Every time you leave like a video game (Meredith MacLeod Davidson)

It has been a while since I’ve more regularly discussed an issue of Calgary’s legendary literary journal filling Station [see my review of #83 here; my review of #81 here; see my review of #57: showcase of experimental writing by women here, etc], but I am trying to get better at it. Did you see all the posts up at The Typescript celebrating filling Station’s thirtieth anniversary? Thirty years is a long time for a journal, despite the handful of journals that have made it far longer (Arc Poetry Magazine is well over one hundred issues, for example), but always worth acknowledging a birthday, especially for a journal founded by scrappy youths passionate about experimental writing, and producing a journal that has continued entirely with that founding aesthetic. Yes, I said it: filling Station is and always has been run by scrappy youths passionate about experimental writing, both in Canada and well beyond. Built with their usual array of “poetry, fiction, non-fic, review, interview, project, art,” filling Station #84 provides a showcase of established and emerging, some of whom I know well and others I’ve never heard of. Virginia-born Scotland-based Meredith MacLeod Davidson, for example, is a poet entirely new to me through these pages, as is Northern Ontario poet Erin Wilson [although a quick search provides that I actually interviewed her two years ago], who has two poems in this particular issue, including the poem “Tenebrae,” that begins:

The watering can beads with rain.
Slugs slowly ruin the gibbous rind of the pumpkin. 

Put your black nylon socks on your cold black feet.
Think think think, charcoal, in darkness.

Further, there’s Calgary-based poet, fiction writer and editor Chimedum Ohaegbu, and her poem “Culpable, Too, the Minutes,” that begins: “My innocence on the abacus / although you’ve already deemed me / wolf. Courtroom drama / as directed by Internet questionnaire: / How often do you feel seen?” Otherwise, I think everyone should be reading the work of Montreal poet Misha Solomon (who has a couple of chapbooks out, with a full-length poetry debut out next year, you know, with Brick Books), or Brooklyn-based Canadian poet Michael Chang [see my review of their latest here], both of whom have new work in this particular issue. Or there is Toronto writer Sneha Subramanian Kanta, with the three-stanza/paragraph piece “Three Broken Sonnets: Escape Room City,” a lyric and narrative swirl of layer upon layer that includes: “Two cups of hot chocolate arrive in / ceramic glasses like we were drinking a warm beverage in the home / of a friend. No one befriends another in this city because they don’t / have time. The evening streets are quiet although hours are porous. / I have begun to understand the concept of time as not being finite.” As ever, if you wish to know what is happening on the ground when it comes to contemporary writing, one could not do much better than paying attention to the little magazine, and filling Station (alongside The Capilano Review, Geist and FENCE magazine) remains high on my list.

filling Station #83 : a bit of love and something to believe in,

 

As the clavier (still?) makes clear… (The angels between us
& God?) Woodcut forests. Blake, ‘London’ less real than its

soot. Locked in, language’s rooms of one’s own? Death’s life
like ellipsis. Ah, the body-length turban of prose! Out of Epic

sorts? Words: gods, lemon trees. Reality’s crusts: gaunt readers,
digest. (The round about here – poetry, poesy, jars of old light-

ning…) Wind, shards in the vase. (In moonlight’s chambers,
simile’s slow gin.) Queerly vital lilacs: Being, such an

exhibitionist! (Atoms, abyss abacus.) The slow-
ly rose shadows: the still yellow

cups. (Sean Howard, “Still Poems (for Wallace Stevens)”)

In case you weren’t aware, Calgary’s filling Station magazine recently celebrated their thirtieth anniversary this year, and a whole slew of pieces celebrating this milestone, by past contributors and editors, appeared recently via The Typescript (including Derek Beaulieu, Karl Jirgens, Doug Steadman, r rickey). Thirty years is a long time in publishing, I hope you know, especially a journal with such a combined high turnover of editorial, as well as its range of high-quality material. The journal originally emerged during an important period in Calgary writing: one that expanded and exploded across experimental poetry and prose, centred around the University of Calgary creative writing program [Derek Beaulieu and I worked to acknowledge a number of the practitioners that emerged from this explosion through our anthology The Calgary Renaissance]. Throughout all sorts of activity, filling Station remained, and continues to remain, the publishing heart of that movement, one that continues to pubish and champion work that might otherwise be seen as too far “out there.”

Part of what is always interesting about filling Station is the blend of styles, leaning an experimental bent (but open to the straighter lyric) across work by emerging and established writers, allowing for the possibility of pushing against boundaries of form, in matters lyric, visual and through the sentence, and everything in-between. While the visual collage of South Bend, Indiana-based Toronto poet Camille Lendor’s “The Best Pizza Dough Recipe” might be built upon the central core of a more traditional lyric, Calgary poet David Martin’s “Mnemotechnics” and California-based poet [Sarah] Cavar’s “Goodbye Forever Party” are curious to see side-by-side, given their echoes of each other’s striking lines of accumulation. “I go like smoke pulled toward a ceiling,” Cavar writes, “Leave bad black brackets on pastel walls.” I’m intrigued as well by the small points, the accumulated moments, of Ottawa poet Frances Boyle’s poem “inflorescence,” more pointillist than her “Stroll,” but within the same field of structure. In each poem, she structures a single sentence-thought across breaks of space, line, breath and thought. “who gave me life / give me this,” the second half of her first poem reads, “our relatives the air / flood // our rich friend / silt [.]”

There’s a curious short scene, a short story by Cobourg writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross, “The Red Ink,” that is quite intriguing. He writes to explore and expand upon a single frame [read my essay on his most recent collection of stories, in case you hadn’t seen], a structure he’s used often across his prose, but held here as a focus upon that singular moment, one that still allows a view of the rippling effect beyond. As he writes, near the end:

            “I am happy here,” perhaps he explained, “but your time is getting short. The winds are changing, the air is desiccated. The red ink that flows through your veins will soon start to search for a way out.”
            In the distance, laughter.
            Skates arcing through the air.