Ongoing notes: late February, 2026: Roberto Harrison, Abigail Garrison + Hugh Thomas,

By now you’ve heard that VERSeFest is coming up in a few weeks, yes? And hosting poetry workshops with Calgary poet Sheri-D Wilson and Toronto poet Paul Vermeersch! Spaces are still available! You should sign up to those. And did you hear I’ve a new poetry collection out later this spring?

MI/Kingston NY: From Milwaukee poet and editor Roberto Harrison (and the first publication of his I’ve seen) comes Posthuman Native: The Orchid (Kingston NY: Spiral Editions, 2025), an assemblage of poems each composed with lines that accumulate, stacked like cord wood. “a stretch of the body / ghosts matter in the light / of the shadows,” begins the poem “end mark for recursion,” “we / signal the afternoon / without a place to be outright / we make noise in the river / wood is out everywhere / in stacks of keys.” Through a heft of lyric, Harrison ebbs and flows through the query: what does it mean to be post-human? There’s a pacing, rhythm to these pieces that reads pulsed, almost unrelenting; a collage of layered lines that really shine across the lyric. And in the centre of the collection, eight full-colour collages that burst through. Each poem is thick, both in density and size, each of the eighteen poems assembled here far too large to large to include here (although there is a shorter one in Spanish, which does intrigue). There’s an urgency to Harrison’s poems, one fueled by a fierce intelligence and ongoing meditation on who we are and have become, and where, instead, we should be. We should, we could, be so much better. As the first half of the poem “patterns speaking,” reads:

what has made me move
to allow the streams to feel like blood
flown for the birds, for the hummingbird
night? my bodies stand to allow
discussion of the number, my bodies
remain outside in the afterimage
of darkness, when I speak, there is
another to stand within, there is another
to remain outside in the water. of all
the above ground monuments, I do not
have a single white flag for surrender, I
do not know what the symbol is to return
again, to the faltering display of human
arrogance, my revolver does not turn
and I do not become like the river
that we know. I do not become
like the fine gold that another planet
makes us move around in, in the exception
to winter I become again what I am not.

America, somewhere: A further title produced by b l u s h produced “in an undisclosed number of copies) in their “illicit zines” series is FUGUE (summer 2025) by Abigail Garrison, an individual described online as “a poet and artist living in Mexico City.” FUGUE is composed as a sequence of fifteen numbered short bursts of first-person molologue/meditation, slowly moving and stretching across and within a particular held moment. “the barrel forms / a perfect circle” Garrison writes, to open poem “vii,” “pacing back / the quest / crossing the / fragrant / churchyard / I go / uphill / uphill / desert clouds / buffer in / fabulous / mirage rippling / distant / like the sea [.]” There is a distance the poem, the narrator and narration, reaches for, but one that can’t ever be reached, purposefully stretching to see what might lay behind the horizon of the next moment. The lyric holds pause, slow and deliberate, even purposeful, in its meandering. Or, as the first poem in the sequence reads:

uninspired except for
objects I keep
candlesticks
linen sheets
silver rings
in a dish
in a dish
memory cards
moonstone
a desert wind blows across
my field of vision
tousled
night after night
I come to town
in red silk shorts

Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: From perennial favourite Hugh Thomas comes the new translation They Want to Steal My Name by Henri Michaux (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2025). For some years now, Montreal-based Thomas has been working translations of poems from languages he doesn’t read or understand, utilizing the source material as a kind of jumping-off point into something entirely new and original, playing a surrealism of mistranslated poems across a small array of chapbooks (including some through above/ground). Although, given how long Thomas has lived in Montreal, this does read a straighter (relatively) series of translations, offering a new line of thinking across work already working a surrealism by the late Henri Michaux (1899-1984), a writer, poet, and visual artist of Belgian origin who lived much of his adult life in Paris. The poems here have the flavour of certain titles produced over the years by La Presse (a press I haven’t heard of in some time, are they even still around?). The poems are built with a prose structure but lyric line, one infused with a curious blend of elements, both straight and surreal simultaneously (with shades of Stuart Ross, also). I would hope that Thomas continues on this particular trajectory, I would love to see these pieces find a home in a full collection.

They want to steal my name

As I was shaving this morning, stretching out and lifting my lips a little to get a tauter surface, affording a good resistance to the razor, what do I see? Three gold teeth! I, who have never been to the dentist!

Ha! Ha!

And why?

Why? To make me doubt myself, and then to take my name of Barnabas from me. Oh, they’re pulling hard on the other side, they’re pulling and pulling.

But I am also ready, and I hang on to it. “Barnabas,” “Barnabas,” I say, softly but firmly, and on their side, all their efforts are reduced to nothing.

Andrea Rexilius, Séance of the Bees

 

I found a flight pattern, a ritual, a trace, a beehive, an infinite knot, a way to write and revise, and revise again. A way to resentence the sentence my sister and I had been handed. To change the story by telling our story. To enter a wound. To face it again and again until we are transformed by it. Until we see it clearly and move it through our body.

My sister and I are not related. Not by blood. But we are the same age, and we are both named Andrea. Her mother and my father married when we were 10. I always thought of her as part doppelganger, part mirror-image. I was jealous that her mother fled with her in the night, brought her to America. For me it was the opposite. My mother fled to California but left me behind in Chicago with my dad. My sister’s mother is dramatic, emotional, talkative, whereas my own mother is pragmatic, quiet, and emotionally reserved.

I began stitching lines instead of writing them.

 

A line is a descent, an exception into the underworld, into the root system of language. It marks an act of sensing, of perception translated by the realm of the mouth.

 

I titled the stitches, Séance of the Bees. (“As Long as the Stitch will Hold”)

The latest from Denver, Colorado poet and editor Andrea Rexilius is the poetry title Séance of the Bees (Troy NY: CLASH Books, 2026), a book that extends the title section of her prior collection, Sister Urn (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], writing through and around the death of her sister, and an ongoing grief. “To engage with séance as a form of research. As a way of calling forth,” she writes, near the opening of the collection, “a way of uncovering the feminine. Not to speak as, but to speak alongside. Not to decode or decipher but to create a cacophony. A woven tongue of one. // The collaged poetess as source text. The she as sorceress.” Utilizing collaged text and image, I find it intriguing the way that Rexilius extends this conversation through her own response to grief, to her late sister; furthering what doesn’t or, really, shouldn’t easily or quickly leave, but, as ever, takes the time and the process that it requires, on its own terms. “My sister has to come up again.” she writes, to open “What Asks Us to Be Formed.” “It’s the way repetition works. Something dives down. Another thing comes up for air. To create a hem. Confine. Piece of cloth edging around you. A blank page folding in on the circumference of your body. The subject is one of enclosure and one of breath. To be drowned inside a particular story. The story that is your un-telling.” There is such a physicality, such a tangible quality to Rexilius’ lines, enough that they might hold one aloft, or pull you in. Such heft and heartbreak, one might get lost in.

I’ve been an admirer of Rexilius’ work for some time now, as she is also the author of To Be Human Is To Be a Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012) [see my review of such here] and New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here]. There’s such a lyric through her prose, a prose held as poetry, and an interest in constructing collage into such a layered coherence; one that thinks through from a foundation of human empathy and interconnectedness to others; one that has always held an open heart across a fine intelligence and an ear for music. “She will be carried from the flowers of one language to another.” Rexilius writes. “She will be carried downstream to a cave at the edge of the river. Feel behind her stone pathway and mossy roof, inner cathedral singing with the voice of a witch.”

The Way the Language Was

The day the deer died,
I was alive in my house.
I was alive in a watery field
of glaciers. In the realm
of birchwood in my throat.
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire.
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dani Netherclift

Dani Netherclift is a poet and essayist living and writing on unceded Taungurung Country in Australia. Dani has a PhD in Creative Writing with a specialization in the elegiac lyric essay. Her shorter essays and poems have been widely published in Australia in literary journals and anthologies. She has won or been otherwise commended in multiple writing competitions. Visit her online at dani.netherclift.com.au.

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’m not sure my first book changed my life, however, my writing in this book is now being read in another hemisphere. Also, I must say, having Helen Garner read my work and say nice things and send me a card felt quite huge last year!

My recent (as yet unpublished) work owes so much to what I learned in writing Vessel, especially as I had the privilege of writing Vessel as the creative component of an arts PhD, which means that I had superb mentorship and feedback throughout the process. With my new book, I really missed that guidance but realised I could write a book without it. The new book is also about grief but is also very much rooted in eco-lit.

2 - How did you come to lyric essays first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?
I came to writing and reading fiction and poetry first, but when it came to this book, I was looking at a form that's not really understood outside the academy where I live (Australia), so I wanted to explore that form from the point of view of a niche subject as per the requirements of a PhD. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, I found the form of the lyric essay was a perfect “container” for this long-held grief and the wider cultural, historical and literary stories attached to it. The lyric essay shares the project of meaning-making with its readers and lends itself to the white spaces of what can’t be known or what is unspeakable. Being a poet first, I also loved the convention or lyric language inherent in this form.

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?
Vessel took about a year to write. My current project has taken about two years. Because I write in a fragmentary form, I often think of other fragments that don’t quite fit into where I’m at in the manuscript, but I have a section at the end of the working manuscript that I call composition notes. I have pages and pages of composition notes, and then it’s a matter of mosaicking things together where they fit just ‘so’ and land with meaningful connection with other fragments. There’s also the work of association, where writing about or researching one thing will lead you creatively and cognitively in an unexpected direction, and I find that that part of things keeps happening right up until final edits.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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?
Vessel was always a book. The PhD was actively researching how one might write a longform lyric essay, how it would come together, though I didn’t initially know what it was about. The book I’m currently working on began as a shorter piece, though.

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! Because the work is crafted as lyric in nature, it lends itself to being spoken aloud. 

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?
Vessel is certainly thinking through theoretical questions. Another reason the lyric essay works well for this project is that it enacts a thinking through of questions, or meditations; it emulates in some ways how our memories work i.e. in a nonlinear, meandering, associative way. In Vessel I’m thinking about what it means to not view a body after death, but the larger questions have to do with reconciling presence to absence. To think about that, I was reading hauntology, elegy, and theory on fragmentation, among other things. I was also thinking about a theoretical framework for the lyric essay.

As to what the current questions are, well there are so many. I just started reading Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, and that seems terribly pertinent at this present moment. What does “freedom” mean? 

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?
For me, writing and reading are both types of “medicine”. Words can console and heal, or they have done so in my own life. With the current parlous state of the world, writing should serve to also clarify how people are feeling, and that’s something that AI/large language systems are so incapable of doing. People’s blithe use of AI slop everywhere you turn is depressing precisely because of its lack of meaning and spiritual or intellectual value. I’m turning to the writers I admire to see how they’re interpreting the moment we find ourselves in, wherever we are in the world. It’s great that we can also read such writers in near-to-real time, and I enjoy the thoughts of Jeanette Winterson, Patti Smith and Annie Lamott for example landing regularly in my email inbox.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s essential to have another set of eyes on your writing. What that process is like depends on the editor. For Vessel, I had the wonderful Felicity Plunkett, a prodigiously talented poet, reviewer and essayist, and I never met a suggestion from her that I didn’t immediately recognise as something that would enhance the text. The process of editing with Felicity felt like a nourishing, writerly conversation, and I was and remain so grateful for it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Give yourself permission to write an average first draft. The real work comes after that, when you have something to start with, and perfect.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (lyric essays to poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s easy to move between these genres. Within Vessel, especially, I move between genres, or the conventions of them. It’s appealing because some things are better conveyed via one genre and others via a different genre. Sometimes, things suggest themselves in a particular genre.

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 have a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, so most of my writing takes place during school hours during school terms. I walk my daughter to school nearby, then come home and do an hour or so of household tasks, before sitting down at my desk and hoping to work for 4-5 hours. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I feel as though I can’t get into the flow of writing, I turn to reading and research. Reading certain writers, like Anne Carson or Carol Mavor for instance, always inspires me in a new way to get back into setting words on a page. I’m a big believer in the power of daily practice though, so I always write a page in a journal even if I’m not otherwise writing, so that I’m always somewhere in the flow of writing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I live in a rural mountain town. I think in winter, it’s a smoky smell from all the fires burning in people’s hearths. 

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?
I would say “all of the above”. Observing nature is an important part of my writing practice generally, and there are references to music, science and visual art all throughout Vessel, in addition to the many references to other books and poems. Creative work is derivative of the world around it in so many ways.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Anne Carson, Kate Zambreno, Sarah Manguso, Eula Biss, Roxane Gay, Helen Garner, Susan Howe, Heather Christle, Joan Didion, Annie Ernaux, Olivia Laing, Deborah Levy, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, and Carol Mavor are all writers I’ve found important for my writing and examining ways of looking at and thinking about the world. I also love Michael Ondaatje and Leonard Cohen. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to places I haven’t yet been, like Canada! And I’d love to teach a class on the lyric essay.

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 came (back) to writing late; after having my children, I returned to university (having dropped out of two courses in my early 20s), completed an undergrad and honours in creative writing and then went on my PhD. Before that, I spent a lot of my life selling costume jewellery and selling homewares from India to shops, and working at trade fairs around Australia, though I wouldn’t say this is something I loved. In my head, I was always a writer. But otherwise, I helped to run a writer's festival in the town where I live last year, and that was a thrill (and a lot of hard work). I’d love to do more of that. I’m not sure I would have ever gotten to do that without first being a writer, mind you.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve always wanted to write, and I’ve always loved to read, so I guess that’s where the impetus came from. I did what I felt I could do well. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I loved The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck. I can’t remember the last great film, though I am so looking forward to the adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s wonderful book, Hamnet.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on edits for a book called Preludes for an Ending, that weaves together fragments anticipating the death of my mother (she died last year) with observations on extreme climate events as they unfolded during the process of writing, and the mediations of French linguist Roland Barthes’ in his Mourning Diary, written in private fragments after the death of his mother, Henriette. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;