Lydia Unsworth, Stay Awhile

 

FFS

It’s like, you built this. You don’t just get to say I quit and start again like you’re 77 and can father a new family without consequence any time you feel up to it. You built this and you leave it behind. The guardians say no while you try to cut it out like circles from a tight orange dress. But who listens to a guardian? We’ve got the loud man here. And he’s outwitted us again because in the rules, rules he wrote, it says culture is the hand around the wrist.

The latest from Manchester, England poet Lydia Unsworth is Stay Awhile (Merseyside UK: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2026), a book of buildings and human occupation, construction and how human construction occupies space. Through the poems of Stay Awhile, Unsworth stcutures a book-length suite that examines how building construction shapes the way we interact with each other and our environment, including apartment towers, sculpture and monuments. “no one knows why Intestine City is called Intestine City,” she writes, as part of “Ex Terra Lucem,” a title that translates from Latin into “Light from Earth,” “no one / but people are able to find a tiny piece of glass / from 2,400 years ago and explain it / from the earth comes light / we should not deny it [.]” She writes on connecting human construction to human response and interaction, and into parenting, differentiating the responses between our first-person narrator and her two young children, who regularly appear to provide their own commentary. Through moving across such landscapes, the poems ask: what become our responsbiliities to such spaces, each other and even to ourselves, through such repeated and continuous abandonment? Or, as the poem “You Get Free Parking All Day” offers:

 

 

little trees have been popped at the bases of all the stairwells
so we don’t notice the stairwells and attempt to ascend

they don’t want us to be reminded of what was once
dreamt for the upper level 

we’ve got to ignore the fact that we are all ashamed

Through long stretches of accumulation, Unsworth composes her poems through layerings of narrative shorthand, offering only what is absolutely necessary, that form lyric shapes, turning at times from a kind of music to more direct speech with striking effect. “you can start to appreciate scale // a horse reared / behind a low fence // signs started to imply we shouldn’t be here,” she writes, as part of “Unproductive and Unfunctional Blankness,” “I hate guard dogs / the way they ruin an entire species [.]” Unsworth offers poems that blend description, meditation, prose blocks, line breaks and visual rhythms that cohere into a poetry of subtle but seismic narrative force. “If you don’t like it,” begins the short piece “Middlehaven,” “knock it down. Knock it down again. Just keep knocking it down until you get it right. My child does this with a pack of cards, her hands full of dice. // This is my home. I have bought it and I will keep on buying it.”

rob reading and podcasting in Victoria, April 24 + 25.

I seem to be doing a whole slew of events in Victoria, British Columbia later this month, in case you are around. Reading twice, and even on stage doing a podcast! Who can keep track of it all. Promoting the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), with most likely a handful of chapbooks as well. Might we see you?

April 24, 2:00pm: reading at the James Bay New Horizons Centre, 234 Menzies St James Bay, open set sign-up 1:30pm. hosted by Anna Cavouras. 

April 24, 7:30pm: reading with Anna Yin and Phoebe Wang as part of Planet Earth Poetry, Russell Books. Doors and open mic sign up, 7pm.

April 25, 5:30-7:30pm: The Poet Laureate Live Podcast: rob mclennan and Kyeren Regehr. Be part of our live studio audience! Tickets required. Haus of Owl Creation Lab, 780 Blanshard St 4th floor. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nicole Zdeb

Nicole Zdeb is an editor at Airlie Press, a consulting astrologer, and a writer. Originally from Vermont, Nicole spent her formative years on the East Coast before settling in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, writer Jamie Cooper. Nicole holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and works at the University of Kansas. Her first full-length collection of poems, The End of Welcome, was published by Airlie Press in 2025. www.nicolezdeb.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This is my first full-length book so I am experiencing  how my life is changing. It came out the same year my father died, so it’s been a year of initiations.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry is the genre that has the strongest grip on me. It calls me back, continuously. It reflects the natural state of my thought process - elliptical, associative, elusive, and fragmentary.

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?
Starting? I am a quick starter. When drafting, the words flow like cheap merlot. I turn my executive mind off and my receiving mind on and enter the current, banging away with utter freedom. But that’s not how I polish, revise, or craft. There’s a great divide between the drafting process and the rest of it. 

When I was working on The End of Welcome, I collated all the versions of the poems in it and that manuscript was close to 800 pages. So the process with The End of Welcome included wrestling with an 800-page tiger. 

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?
The End of Welcome was individual pieces that found themselves cohabitating in the same manuscript. The manuscript evolved over a period of about six or seven years. The manuscript I am working on right now has started as a book - it’s thematically linked and being written with the end shape in mind. The methodology is project dependent. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I find readings enchanting. There’s something ancient and nourishing about humans gathering to hear other humans. 

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?
The End of Welcome has social concerns around abuse of power and tyranny. It engages in questioning who has agency, who controls progress and our bodies, and who dictates the direction of our collective hope. The name itself is a nod to that - the age of America as a welcoming agent to the dispossessed, the searching, the poor and resilient is over. It’s becoming a plutocratic dystopia. Who belongs? 

Here are a couple of the questions on my mental altar:

How do we keep world-centric and human-centric without becoming cynical, exhausted, and hopeless?

How do we keep ourselves tender enough to rest and eat good food and laugh when the emperor is running around naked and stark? 

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 don’t know what the role of the writer is in larger culture - we are treading in waters that reject the intellectual, complexity, liberalism, and the humanities. Throw AI into the mix and it’s a watershed moment. Society is reshaping and so is the role of its gatekeepers, champions, and pillars.

In terms of the ideal writers role, it depends on the writer. If the writer is a small-minded bigot from Dogpatch who uses their platform to spew orange vomit, then a NPC role would be preferable.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Personally, I’d rather stick my tit in a Cuisinart. 

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to stories to essays to reviews to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?
Its natural to glide between painting, photography, poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews, but I can’t sing or dance, and that’s why I never made it as a Rockette. 

The appeal? There’s pleasure in multiplicity. Different genres let you do different things, offer different quests, and present different challenges.

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’ve been writing for 41 years and I don’t have a Routine. I have provisional routines. Sometimes they will last a week, sometimes a month, sometimes a season. I’m in flux.

Right now, this is my routine: Monday through Friday, get up at 6 am and write for 1.5 hours in the morning before work. When I am done with my work day, I need to unfold my mind and let it flutter on the breeze. I am in bed by nine pm, so there’s no night writing sessions anymore. But thirty years ago? I’d be writing till dawn’s wine-stained fingers ripped the pen out of my fist.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Astrology. I have a system where I use horary charts (charts of the hour) to unlock when I get locked up. I engage with the universe as a creative partner.  

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pierogies and onions and Emeraude.

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?
Visual art - I get juiced when I am at a gallery or museum. Spending time with visual art changes my brainwaves and unlocks escape hatches and secret doors. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
For my life outside of my creative work, I read a lot of astrology since I have been a consulting astrologer since the late 90’s: William Lilly, Liz Greene, Demetra George, Chris Brennan, Renn Butler, and Steven Forrest are a few of the names on my shelf.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Build a yurt.

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?
Perfume designer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Absolutely no choice in the matter. Makes me wonder about free will, tbh. I’ve been writing creatively since I was 11 years old. In a dynamic life filled with reinventions, writing is the throughline.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve been on a Han Kang kick lately and was absolutely blown to bits by Human Acts. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
A fun project that marries my two favorite things: poetry and perfume. I spent about a season waking up early and starting each day with a perfume. I’d sit in the semi-dark and smell the perfume, put it on my body, smell it as it developed, and then write about it. Then I explored what the public was saying about each perfume and what the perfume house itself was saying. I’m layering those three axis of language around each scent: the personal, the social, and the corporate.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jake Skeets, Horses

 

PART THREE          MEMORIAL

I trace the outline
of horses encased
in hydrated lime
            an offering
to return home
to loam to ground water 

the horses buried
on-site to free up
the creeks and crease of their pasts
their makeup all song
and morning and mane 

here, enshrined
with the memory
of a stock pond
horses buried
thigh-deep in mud
clawing for the first world
for something we left behind

The second full-length collection by Oklahoma-based poet Jake Skeets, a member of the Navajo Nation (and the third appointed as the Nation’s Poet Laureate) is the brilliantly and heartbreakingly devastating collection Horses (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions/Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2026), a title that follows his full-length debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019). As the notes at the back of the collection provide:

In 2018, approximately 191 horses were found dead at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation. The horses were identified as feral horses, wild horses, or free-roaming horses. Stock ponds are used as water stations for roaming livestock in what has been called an arid landscape. The stock pond where the horses were found was near Gray Mountain in Northern Arizona. It had been dry because of the extreme drought the Navajo Nation is facing, caused by decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate. The horses were found thigh- and neck-deep in the mud, some horses on top of other horses.

These animals were searching for water to stay alive. In the process, they unfortunately burrowed themselves into the mud and couldn’t escape because they were so weak.
 – Former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez

The horses were found in a circle, mud caked in their coats. Some horses were found upright as if running. The Navajo Nation, as a response sprayed the horses with hydrated lime to speed up decomposition and buried the horses on-site. Today, the feral horse problem is contributing to the drought conditions of the Navajo Nation.

One horse survived and her name is Grace.

Set with opening lyric, Horses is constructed as a book-length suite in four sections—“HORSES,” “HOOTSO,” “ENTANGLEMENTS 1” and “AND STILL DEER SOFTEN”—writing a collection a dream-land of decolonial meditations on apocalypse through fences and boundaries, pipelines and blockades and dried-up lakebeds, all of which lead back to the book’s foundation: of dead wild horses and climate crises. “there [            ] a long garden,” he writes, mid-way through the collection, “lush / locked, an oasis there / and we [         ] our torsos / touching in the tickseed // never touching though / a wildfire burns along the highway / in our memory of each other / you come closer to the asphalt [.]” Acknowledging a loss amid losses, his is a lyric composed across a hush; composed amid moments held in space. Skeets’ lines are remarkably pointed, composing Horses as a kind of essay-poem around a devastated landscape, writing both a love song to the land and its inhabitants as well as offering warning, elegy and witness. “When we get to the dead horses,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of “FIELD SONG,” “I suppose the wind / is felt, deep blue within the silt of it—when we get to the field, / I close my shutter left open.”

There’s a heft to this collection, writing the legacy of dead horses “mired in mud” seeking water, a narrative encapsulation and elegy around landscape and loss, colonial and climate impact. “In the beginning, breath—erosive slather of wind and vein. / Waters saint the church caught at the throat, / callus, calcium, a bitter tide. The first body bent / into locust into tower : a mountain physics, an early river.” There’s such a sense of the physical landscape articulated through these pages, writing a perspective and a space even through citing their slow erosion. Or, as he writes:

there was a lake here you say
I repeat there was a lake here
as if to at least see my voice touch yours
and you trace my lip with your [                       ] 

there [                                       ] a lake here
and just because there isn’t anymore
doesn’t we mean we don’t feel
the water echo beneath us

Camilla Gibb, I Used to Be a Pisces

 

Organ Meat

I spent years with a therapist
who encouraged me to unravel
the ways in which my mother
had failed us. 

I was resistant

preferring to listen to a butcher
who kept steering me
towards better cuts of meat. 

Only once I was led toward the organs
did I realize I was eating
my own tongue.

Curious to see a debut poetry title from Toronto writer Camilla Gibb, I Used to Be a Pisces (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026). For those unaware, Gibb is an award winning and bestselling prose author, having published five novels and a memoir, a position not always followed by an announcement into a poetry debut (or at least, not one usually followed by such a compelling debut). The poems of I Used to Be a Pisces, collected with accompanying collage-works by the author, are intimate and sharp, taking narrative twists, overlays and turns; they begin, offering a series of openings and suggestions of where each might travel, allowing the reader their own scope and agency to enter. “The disappointment of a peach,” begins the short “Fruit, End of Season,” “chalk fibres at summer’s end // the chemical of love / dying beyond its season [.]” Interestingly, one might see connections, echoes of tone and tenor, between these poems and certain works by Canadian poets Alice Burdick [see my review of her latest here], Jaime Forsythe and Lillian Nećakov (another poet who works with visual collage) [see my review of my latest here], all of whom are known, through varying degrees, for pushing their lyric up against (and through) a boundary of surrealism. “We watched a red setter carrying rocks into waves / and forgot about my broken sandal.” begins the short descriptive lyric of “Ashore,” “We were young then, holding hearts, / hands, on a cusp of faraway ocean // convinced of the earth’s beauty, / our own, the shore // my mouth open like an oyster / to taste the pearl on your tongue.”

Set in the table of contents as untitled clusters (over more overt sections), Gibb’s lyric narratives push against that surreal edge, one pushed further through her use of collaged image, although one less overt than holding a sense just out of focus; a narrative clarity that occasionally drifts into elements of dream: both tangible and intangible. There’s an intimacy to these pieces, one that focuses on detail, and the possibility of how the form of poetry might provide that attention. “You have missed the garden,” writes the poem “Between Seasons,” “I have missed you.” One might wonder what Gibb considered possible through the poem that her prose might not have allowed, or if this collection is simply the result of writing that occurred across the length and the breadth of her writing life.