Spotlight series #109 : Terri Witek

The one hundred and ninth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon and Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2025 edition: June 21, 2025

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

 
the ottawa
    small press
    book fair

spring 2025 :
will be held on Saturday, June 21, 2025 at Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road.

“once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan and James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada...” Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)

admission free to the public.
$25 for exhibitors, full tables
$12.50 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9; paypal options also available

Note: due to demand, we offer half as well as full tables (because not everyone needs a full table, and this allows more exhibitors to participate).
To be included in the exhibitor catalogue: please include name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered and any other pertinent info, including upcoming Ottawa-area events (if any). Be sure to send by June 10th if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

And we're doing the pre-fair reading as well at Anina's Cafe! see info here!
: and we're on Bsky now! that's exciting, yes? follow us!

BE AWARE: given that the spring 2013 was the first to reach capacity (forcing me to say no to at least half a dozen exhibitors), the fair can’t (unfortunately) fit everyone who wishes to participate. The fair is roughly first-come, first-served, although preference will be given to small publishers over self-published authors (being a “small press fair,” after all).

The fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including regular appearances by exhibitors including: above/ground press ; Anvil Press / A FEED DOG BOOK ; Apt. 9 Press ; Arc Poetry Magazine ; Manahil Bandukwala ; battleaxe press ; Jessica Bebenek ; Book*hug Press ; Bird Lips Zine ; The BumblePuppy Press ; Bywords ; Dave Cooper ; CreateSpace ; Amanda Earl ; Dr. Softpaws' Fur-Imagination ; Elliott Dunstan ; equitableEducation.ca ; flo. lit mag ; Good Golly Zines ; The Grunge Papers ; John Haas ; Seymour Hamilton ; Heartlines Spec ; Horsebroke Press ; Shirley MacKenzie ; Robin Blackburn McBride ; Patricia McCarthy ; Kersplebedeb Publishing (LeftWingBooks.net) ; Paragon of Virtue Press / la presse POV ; phafours press/Writebulb app/Pearl Pirie ; Proper Tales Press ; Puddles of Sky Press ; Raccoon Comics ; Claudia Coutu Radmore ; ROOM 3o2 BOOKS ; Sarah's Zines ; Simulacrum Press ; shreeking violet press ; swooncor ; Tel # Publishing ; Things in my Chest ; Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] ; Turret House Press ; Alberte Villeneuve-Sinclair ; Wyrdsmyth Press ; etc etc etc.

the ottawa small press fair is held twice a year (apart from these pandemic silences), and was founded in 1994 by rob mclennan and James Spyker. Organized/hosted since by rob mclennan.

Come on by and see some of the best of the small press from Ottawa and beyond!

Free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. Unfortunately, we are unable to sell things for publishers who aren’t able to make the event.

Also: please let me know if you are able/willing to poster, move tables or distribute fliers for the event. The more people we all tell, the better the fair!

And don't forget: the fall event (31st anniversary!) has already been announced for Saturday, November 22, 2025;

Contact: rob mclennan at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com for questions, or to sign up for a table.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Thomas O'Grady

Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he served as Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019. He was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. He is the author of three books of poems, What Really Matters (2000) and Delivering the News (2019), both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, and Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems (2025), published by Arrowsmith Press in Boston. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

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

On an earthy level, I’ll admit that for a guy growing up on PEI, the phrase “published poet” rang almost as magically as “NHL defenseman” or “lead guitarist.” On a loftier level, holding What Really Matters in my hands, I felt a certain sense of arrival—and of affirmation that maybe I had something to say that was worth saying. But then 19 years passed before the publication of my second book, Delivering the News. Tellingly, I suppose, the “Selected Poems” of Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems includes only 15 poems from the first book and only 20 from the second. I’m not disowning all the rest, but I feel that the ones that I’ve included resonate more consistently with the 55 (or so) “New Poems” gathered in Coming Ashore under the title Nuages. With What Really Matters, some of the poems I’ve omitted seem more “earnest” now than they did when I wrote them. In Delivering the News there are poems that I still love that seem now more “of their moment,” so they got sidelined. I think that Nuages has more poems that are built to last. Time will be the judge of that.

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

I published a couple of short stories before I committed to writing poems. I still write fiction, but the writing of poems—short-ish lyric poems, to be exact—fit more neatly into my available time: I was an Irish Studies/English professor with an ambitious scholarly agenda (which I’m maintaining in retirement), and my wife and I also had a very full domestic life with three daughters underfoot (literally) when I was setting out. But I was also teaching a lot of poetry in my literature classes, so I think I gravitated toward that genre because it was very much in the air I was breathing . . . and I felt comfortable breathing it, both inhaling and exhaling.

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?

For me, poems are like cats—they appear mysteriously and unannounced. I grew up with cats, and my wife and I are currently on our third and fourth cats, beautiful sisters, and I pay close attention to feline quidditas. Likewise, I pay attention when I feel a poem stirring in me: of course I try to coax it into being, but sometimes I have to let it emerge on its own terms and in its own good time. That being said . . . I’ve written poems in one sitting, and I have poems that have sat silently inside me for years, even decades, before they start to show themselves.

4 - Where does a poem 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?

I never sit down with the express intention of writing a poem. My poems can start with a word, with a sensation, with a vague memory that has been randomly triggered, with an emotion. Once I jot down a phrase or a line, I might be off to the races . . . or I might not. None of my three books of poems started out with even the slightest notion of a “book” in the offing: I write one poem at a time. Eventually the poems accumulate (sometimes I feel like they’ve bred like rabbits behind my back) and then I try to herd them into some semblance of order. With each of my books I’ve recognized through that process of herding that there are certain themes or motifs that recur, and I’m happy to hear the poems shout out to each other either in a sequence or sometimes across a distance of many pages.

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

I’m very happy to share my poems by way of readings. For me a reading is a social occasion (friends, family, kindred spirits), and the poems are mostly just “the occasion” for that larger occasion. My poems tend to be short—much shorter than the stories I tell to set them up!—so I think they’re audience-friendly for on-the-spot ingestion. Also, I think that when hearing my poems read aloud, an audience can more easily tune in to my natural tendency as a writer to work, or play, with the intrinsic musicality of language. But, frankly, when I’m writing a poem I’m not thinking of an audience: I’m thinking about the poem, of trying to get it right. I recently came upon, and wrote down, this observation by Seamus Heaney: “the one simple requirement—definition even—of lyric writing is self-forgetfulness.”

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?

I read widely, and I am open to all sorts of poems even if they aren’t the sort that I might write myself. I would never prescribe or proscribe for other writers what poems should or shouldn’t do or be—they either speak to us as readers or they don’t. Do they or don’t they—that is the question! In the case of my own poems, I recognize, and admit unabashedly, that I am at least a collateral descendant of poets in the Irish lyric tradition—but with a PEI accent. From the start, my poems have mostly steered clear of highfalutin’ or obscure diction, though I don’t shy away from a rich sonic texture (alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme) or even from a sonic structure like a formal rhymed sonnet. I’ve written a lot of sonnets—maybe more than my fair share—but the abiding lesson I’ve learned from working with fixed forms involves the reciprocal relationship between the formal structure and the rhetorical structure of a poem. As I work on a poem, I eventually become conscious of the movement of an idea through the movement of the words and the lines and then try to shepherd everything toward satisfying closure.

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?

Robert Frost purportedly said: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.” In our politically, socially, and culturally fraught day and age the boundary line between grief and grievance seems not only blurry but perhaps fluid. But I worry that some writers (and readers) give too much credit to poetry’s capacity to redress the wrongs of the world. Airing grievances under the guise of poetry may get the blood boiling, but I subscribe to Zbigniew Herbert’s position: “It is vanity to think one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.”

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

I have never worked with an outside editor. I never even took a Creative Writing course or workshop. I don’t show unfinished work to other writers. I guess I learned how to write poems simply by . . . writing poems! My wife is my first reader, but I never show her what I’ve written until I’m fully satisfied with it myself. With Coming Ashore, the publisher/editor made only one suggestion, which I accepted—that the “New Poems” section be titled Nuages as a nod toward the poem with that title which is itself a nod toward manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt’s wistful melody that became the unofficial anthem of the French Resistance during World War II. Did the publisher/editor recognize that lyric poetry also sings against the darkness of the different clouds that hang overhead in our place and time? Maybe . . .

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

Perhaps this rationalizes my slow process of writing and my modest output, but I think often of the advice Czesław Miłosz proffers in a poem titled “Ars Poetica?” that dates to 1968: “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I think it would be overly simplistic to say they use different parts of the brain, though there may be some truth to that. Back in my teaching days, I would encourage both my Creative Writing students and my literature students to engage with a text by “reading like a writer.” Even as a scholar or a critic I always try to engage with a poem, or a book of poems, or a work of fiction, or lit-crit itself on its own terms first: that, I hope, gives me a generous way of taking its measure before I take a more “evaluative” stance toward it. So I suppose that for me it’s a first take and then a double-take.

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?

Nowadays, my day starts around 6:50 a.m. with a quick cuppa java before heading out with our new puppy tugging at the far end of the leash. Back in the olden days, when we had three highschoolers under our roof, I would set the coffeemaker for 5:45 and try to get some writing done before the rest of the house awoke around 6:45. I like to start pushing words around the screen as early in the day as possible—usually nothing of substance comes of that, but it’s at least an act of faith. Then during the day I move from project to project to project—currently, an article on James Joyce and an essay on Heaney, a review of a fine new Irish novel (Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses), a feuilleton about walking the dog that may end up engaging with Polish poet Adam Zagajewski . . . But then several mornings each week get interrupted by coffee meet-ups with friends, though I must say that interruption is a small price to pay for a good chat.

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

Because my teaching career had me on a steady heavy diet of “serious” writing—“literary” fiction, “major” poets, masterpieces of drama, and so on—I always kept on hand a good supply of “palate cleansers,” mostly classic noir novels and international spy thrillers. Page-turners. That’s still the case. I recently read a couple of novels by Jack Beaumont—The Frenchman and Dark Arena—and I’m currently deep into Nick Herron’s Slow Horses . . . I’m also deep into Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins (about the birth of Impressionism) and I recently read John Higgs’s Love and Let Die (about James Bond and The Beatles) . . . Sometimes, simply coming up for air from the heavy stuff can get the creative juices flowing again . . .

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Well, being from Prince Edward Island—sometimes referred to as “the million-acre farm,” sometimes as “Abegweit,” from the Mi’kmak word Epekwitk, commonly translated as “cradled on the waves”—I have to acknowledge two fragrances: freshly-turned soil and briny air.

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?

The natural world has been a steady subject for me pretty much from the time I started writing poems: landscapes and shorescapes and riverscapes, birds and animals, the changing of the seasons . . . Ditto for music and musicians—I suspect that somewhere in my subconscious, guitarists like Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt and fiddlers/violinists like Michael Coleman and Paganini and marquee artists like Irish tenor Josef Locke and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie are “avatars” for “the poet” . . . And another ditto for the visual arts—woodcuts, linocuts, paintings, etchings, photographs: Picasso and Chagall, Bonnard, David Blackwood . . . they all trigger my ekphrastic reflex . . .

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

Many years ago, I published an essay in The New Quarterly in which I wondered what it would feel like to write a poem like Seamus Heaney’s “The Skylight.” Maybe someday I’ll find out, but in the meantime his poems set a high standard for me . . . a standard reinforced frequently, I’ll admit, by my ongoing scholarly commitment to his total body of work. Another poet whose work I like—I especially appreciate his use of simile and metaphor, but also his down-to-earthiness—is Ted Kooser. Early on, Mary Oliver showed me ways of observing the natural world: I love her line that “A poem should always have birds in it”! Although I have no real way to measure this, I feel that my reading of Adam Zagajewski and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer added some “sinew” to my writing in recent years. At our summer home, we have dozens of single volumes of poems by writers from across the spectrum—I start many mornings there by plucking a random volume from the stack and reading a few poems to jumpstart the day. But mostly I read fiction and, increasingly, nonfiction—quite a bit of it involving Paris. I am especially drawn to the period of the 1920s into the 1950s. Giants walked the earth in those times.

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

In literary terms . . . I feel that I have a lot of fiction in me, both short stories and novels, set mostly on PEI. I’d probably have to give up my scholarly life to go down that path, and maybe I will . . .

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 always aspired to be a musician—specifically, a guitarist . . . When I was a highschooler and an undergrad, I developed pretty decent blues chops. But then I stopped playing for about 25 years. When I got back in the saddle, I became obsessed with jazz guitar. I took some lessons and then played in an after-hours combo for 19 years. I probably plateaued just before COVID pulled the plug on everything, and then I moved a 15-hour drive away from my bandmates. I still have eight guitars, but as a guy in a guitar shop said to me recently, “Is that all?”

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

Proximity, perhaps? Osmosis? My father was an English professor—we were a very bookish family! Seven children and we were all readers . . . I don’t recall much poetry in the house, though I have a specific memory that back in high school I happened upon Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” in an anthology: I typed it out and thumb-tacked it to my bedroom wall—it was a window into a world far beyond PEI. As it turns out, I followed in my father’s professorial footsteps and ended up having a rich 36-year career at a fine university in Boston teaching books that I loved and having the license to work with words both on the clock and off.

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

The last great book I read was James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue, a triple biography of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The author’s mastery of the material was remarkable, but he wore his knowledge lightly and the writing was compelling. The last great film I watched was Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford: it was screened in a noir film series I’m attending. I had never heard of it before—it was a revelation.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Mostly I’m trying to clear my desk of some of the scholarly projects that just won’t let me go. And at the same time, I’m trying to kickstart some of the aforementioned fiction projects. But like the old saying goes, Art is long, life is short!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Luisa Muradyan, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

 

Don’t Write Mom Poems

The best writing advice I’ve ever been given
is to avoid poems about motherhood.
Too sappy. Too sentimental. I agree.
Which is why I only write poems about
myself bare-chested on a hunt,
dragging my latest kill
back to my cabin
and feasting
on what I can
only describe
as truth. No room in this cabin
for a nursery or
a metaphorical child
who sleeps when I
sleep and on waking
looks at me not as creator
but as created, singing some ancient
song in the moonlight.

Oh, I am very taken with Luisa Muradyan’s incredible second collection, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated (Dallas TX: Bridwell Press, 2025). According to the author biography on her website (as this is the first I’ve heard of her and her work), Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Texas, has a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston, currently lives in the United States and is also the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska press, 2018) and the forthcoming When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027). The poems in I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated are funny and odd and sad and sharp, offering lines that bend into surreal and twisted shapes, writing on parents, family, children, the scope of war and multi-generational trauma (all of which make me completely understand how she has a collection forthcoming with YesYes Books, as her work fits perfectly with their aesthetic). “Friends,” she writes, to open the absolutely delightful “Woman Posting in Parenting Forum,” “I have come to the end of my rope. / My child has decided that he is the moon / and I cannot convince him otherwise. His entire / face a moon, not a man in the moon, but a toddler / that is the moon, and yes he does give off light / in the darkness and yes some days he pulls the ocean / current toward his body and yes I’ve noticed / that when I take him to poetry readings / or art museums everyone cannot help but stop what / they are doing and begin to draw pictures of him […].” This slim and sharp poetry collection is an assemblage of poems around the narrator’s mother, but is also so much more than that. “[…] my mother somehow knowing how to pilot,” she writes, as part of the wonderfully-propulsive and evocative “My Mother as Tom Cruise,” writing her mother’s strength through the visage of a Hollywood Blockbuster action hero, “a helicopter my mother pulling her abusive / father out of a bathtub my mother slamming / her fist down on the table during an arm / wrestling tournament […].” This collection is an assemblage of poems around the trauma of war in Ukraine, connecting to memory and trauma comparable to other recent works such as Anna Veprinska’s Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] and Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), but is also so much more than that. “The missiles that fell on the village / did not directly hit my grandmother’s / childhood home,” she writes, to close the title poem, “but they were close enough. / The Russian invaders claimed they did not mean / to bomb Babyn Yar, but their shells were close enough. / My great-grandmother wasn’t that Jewish, / but she was close enough. When you ask me for / another response to tragedy, I tend to begin with a joke. Which isn’t / exactly the shape of sorrow, but I assure you, / it is close enough.” These are high-wire poems, perfectly executed with an enormous amount of risk with everything gained, and poems such as “When I Say I Am Not the Speaker of My Poems,” “I Just Need You to Understand that / Chickens Are Basically Dinosaurs,” “The Aushcwitz Exhibit Asks Me / to Rate My Experience,” and “My Mother Insists that I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” really need to be read to be believed, for all of their sharp, even devastating, possibilities. As “My Mother Insists that I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” begins: “You see she would only pay a guy to take some stuff / to a place. It could have been nothing but mostly / it was diamonds and furs, whatever she could get her / hands on. One time it was endless yards of tent material / and what could you even do with that?” There is such an articulation of the human and emotional cost of war throughout these poems, referencing the war in Ukraine and the Holocaust, a backdrop to almost every word she places on each page, one against the other. Muradyan offers a sense of beauty and curiosity layered in surreality underneath a layer of humour, all of which covers, even collides with, an underlay of multi-generational grief, each and all wrapped into and around and through. These poems are smart and savage and subtle, even outlandish, as the end of the poem “Everything is Sexy” writes:

or maybe it’s just you tending to the garden
that I promised I would water and never
do and yet here you are in your gray
gym shorts and this is the summer
of cucumbers as big as my want
and I’m holding an empty salad bowl
waiting for you to come inside.

 

Kyo Lee, i cut my tongue on a broken country

My review of Waterloo, Ontario-based Kyo Lee’s full-length poetry debut, i cut my tongue on a broken country (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun

Adam Haiun is a writer from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for fiction. His work can be found in filling Station, Carte Blanche, and The Headlight Anthology.

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

I feel I’m still midway through the change and lack the ability to fully describe it… I just recently held the book in my hands for the first time, that was a trip. I’m so happy with it. I’m happy!

I’ve always had my fascinations. Dreams and the feeling of dreams, architecture, sickness, masculinity, mourning. I’ve been playing with different levels of abstraction, or obfuscation, depending on how you want to look at it. This book is more abstract (or obfuscated) as part of its premise, or thanks to the conceit of the speaker. The things I’ve been working on most recently feel a bit more forthcoming. I’m also enjoying introducing some more humour, though I think there’s parts of this book that are funny, to me anyhow.

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

I definitely intended to be a fiction writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good stuff of language as it were.

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?

The start comes quickly for me, and then the trial begins. It needs to prove itself as having legs. If it doesn’t, I cannibalize whatever I can from it and use that in the next thing, if applicable. I can handle only about two projects at a time.

Five or so years ago I started writing all my first drafts by hand. I have trouble permitting myself to be messy or to use placeholders when typing things up, and I don’t have that trouble in a notebook. And so when I go about transcribing that piece, the act of transcription becomes the first round of editing, and the document once typed up ends up looking surprisingly clean and good. Very useful practice for me psychologically.

4 - Where does a poem 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?

I’m often drawn to write book-length concepts, or section-length concepts, or long poems, more than shorter, disconnected pieces. I do write shorter pieces, and they’re useful to have, as an arsenal to bring to readings or to send out to mags. They can demonstrate range. But for whatever reason they’re never the ones I’m most proud of. I respond well to the exercise of cultivating a particular voice and maintaining it or orbiting a particular subject matter and attacking it from various angles. When you isolate a part of a conceptual project like that, I feel that you can sense all the weight of the work around it, if that makes sense.

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

I wish I had either more reading commitments, or less. I feel like just enough time goes by between my readings for me to forget that I do enjoy them, and I get the jitters all over again. I wouldn’t say they are part of my creative process necessarily, though I often get lovely feedback, and I really value the social component, seeing and supporting writers I care about. I like readings, but aspects of them frustrate me. I always want to approach the readers and ask: “What does your poem look like? What’s its shape on the page?” Maybe that demonstrates a lack of due respect for the oral tradition… Nobody’s perfect.

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?

I’ve read my fair share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.

I think the question I’m asking is: “Is everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in my experience of reality.

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?

My partner is an editor, and she describes writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour. Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be a good person.

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

This book was my first time working with an outside editor, and it was incredible. Ian Williams is a fantastic writer obviously, and he was the perfect fit to edit this project. We edited together over video calls, just talking over the poems, reading them aloud, discussing whether the formal moves were working, whether the voice was consistent, whether the persona of the speaker was present enough. His suggestions were so natural, so clearly aligned with the spirit of the piece, that they barely felt like changes, and often I found myself answering him with: “Oh, of course!”

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

Salt at every stage of cooking. For writers I think that means trying to be consistently surprising.

10 - 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’m trying my very best to have one. When I work on fiction writing, that requires sitting down, in an uninterrupted way, with goals set and a block of time reserved. When I write poetry I find I can be looser. My aforementioned notebook is with me at all times when I read, as so much of my note-taking involves cribbing from or responding to things I’ve read, and any kind of reading too, from theory to poetry to interviews to the news. I often transcribe my dreams in the morning.

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

I find it’s important to turn to the right thing for the kind of block I’m experiencing. If I’m feeling like I lack permission, for instance, I read a scene from Gravity’s Rainbow, not because I love it necessarily, but to remind myself that, oh, right, there are very many things that can be gotten away with, in form, content, and style.

But often a block is a symptom, usually that I haven’t been social enough, or haven’t spent enough time in nature lately, or haven’t seen a good film in a while. Or tried out a new recipe.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

Gomez Addams. I don’t have a pinstripe suit so I wore a silk robe and I was very comfortable the whole night.

13 - 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?

I grew up in the suburbs, and so I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence being driven into and around the city of Montreal as a passenger. Looking at the city through a car or bus window was my unspoken favourite pastime, and the feeling and moods it produced in me are foundational to my desire to make art. I love concrete and overpasses and old factories. I love the character of the different neighbourhoods. I didn’t internalize the geography of the city itself until I was a full adult, because anytime we drove anywhere, I was so absorbed by the act of looking at it.

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

Guy Davenport, Cormac McCarthy. Anne Carson is absolutely undefeated. I love Tolstoy. Tolkien was my first.

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

Either learn to sail or learn to properly ride a horse. I’ve been in boats and I’ve been on horseback, but in both circumstances I wasn’t really in control… These feel like skills that will make me whole.

16 - 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?

As a kid I loved to draw and paint and wasn’t bad at it either. I could certainly imagine a version of myself who became some kind of visual artist instead. Maybe that’s a copout. Lately I’ve been thinking of doing a course in tiling, maybe mosaic. I want my someday dream kitchen to have some kind of unique mosaic backsplash that I’ll have made myself. My point is I’d likely have done work involving my hands in some way.

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

A lot of people told me to, and I tried to ignore them, and was sad for that whole time, and when I decided to listen I became happier. Really, haha. I tried to be an architect, then an engineer, neither went very far. I struggled to conceive of myself as somebody who could write something worth reading, and it was people who loved me who showed me that I did have that in me, that I had a deep curiosity, an observational eye, a passion and talent for language, et cetera. These are things I’ve only recently felt able to say about myself.

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

I read and loved Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, which is a book of short, slice-of-life vignettes featuring the same pair of characters. I feel like it taught me a lot about how to make the most of the episodic, how the characterful microconflicts and sweet microresolutions between people who love one another can be interesting enough to carry a book.

I recently watched Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) as part of the endless journey my partner and I are on to find a film that will legitimately haunt us, in the way you’re haunted by things when you’re a child. This one got very close to that for me. The blend of the realism or groundedness in the domestic scenes with the horror or absurd, the frightening and traumatic injected with just enough humour, the performances, my God, Isabelle Adjani, the West Berlin setting. An instant favourite for me. Two very oppositional pieces of art, both about relationships.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a novel about a youngish person leaving the city to live with his aunt and uncle in rural Quebec. The conceit is that this character is endlessly forgetful (you can now probably guess who I pulled this from) and impossibly obliging, and his aunt and uncle are very strange and very demanding. And there will be some absurd and surreal stuff happening, which of course the character will have to be totally fine with.

I’ve also recently started a new poetry project, where I’ll be writing a kind of oblique response to each of Montaigne’s essays. Whether it’ll be a chapbook or a section of a book or a whole book is up in the air at this point. This idea came out of an exercise in Sarah Burgoyne’s most recent poetry studio, which I was very fortunate to participate in. So many of the best things I’ve written have come out of great prompts from other people.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;