Jason Purcell, Crohnic

 

On the banks of the North Saskatchewan I shed
my velvet having to rest again on the white powder 

line snow like a tablet crushed and blown toward the crisp
blank future a shrinking 

place where health and death are the same
temperature where I am calculated and reduced so 

there is less of me to keep alive on the banks
of the North Saskatchewan I sat down and sacrificed

And so reads the opening page, the opening passage, of the second full-length collection by Edmonton poet Jason Purcell, the long poem Crohnic (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), a collection that follows their full-length debut, Swollening (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Documenting the landscape of the experience of navigating endless (timeless) time spent in hospital across a diagnosis and treatment of Crohn’s disease, Purcell’s book-length lyric suite, their long poem, articulates an experience from deep within it through a stitch of lyric bursts, of fragments. “Lindsay gives me the idea for this book.” the second page, the second passage, begins, as Purcell speaks of the original prompt by one of their nurses. As Purcell writes, Crohnic writes of and around the experience of “a severe and long-undiagnosed case of Crohn’s disease, [as] each day I swallow down pills and every month I receive infusions by IV that whittle me down but keep me going in the meantime. Like Lindsay says, intense and persistent medical intervention can feel hard to handle.” Purcell writes passages, lyric bursts and broken lines, composed from within a kind of ongoingness, offering medical updates and snapshots of the river valley just outside the window. As they write, early on: “on the banks of the North Saskatchewan I am too // human and I impose that on everything that isn’t too / clear-cut what ill-suited gaze did I carry down and fix // on this landscape its residents the narcissism of being / damaged and thinking the rest is too // a prescribing cold reaches toward and embraces / me the silver skin lifts and peels from the birch // at my side mosses turn their slow growth north / an animal leaves its fur in the branches.”

The winding architecture of the hand
and wrist hanging from the dorsal venous
arch it crumbles
distributes strain I remember
walking beneath it and hearing
a brook’s jewelled noise against stone
somewhere underground deep
in my body where there is some
reservoir I must draw from so long
as I live in this temporary structure

The collage-journal of the book’s overall structure provides a curious book-length tapestry, reminiscent, somehow (of all things), Vancouver writer George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), as both write through a sequence, a discovery poem, of loosely-connected self-contained narrative bursts across a larger, however loose, project-length narrative. Across their text, Purcell repeats the idea and image of “architecture,” reinforcing the central elements of their narrative structure: a sketchbook of notes while feeling trapped within both their own body and the hospital building. “it is better to stay quiet and allow / all of this to happen I shrink the architecture // of this place loses shape / through each swinging doorway are spaces that grow,” they write, some twenty pages in. These are poems held in temporal space, composed from within a perpetual, endless immediate, where the only passage of time comes through nursing shifts, the weather outside, or the shifts of the seasons.

Looking out to a place I can’t reach
on foot until the snow comes 

under me are the tall generations
of conifers whose generations don’t go 

so far back only as far
as the trampling things grow 

undisturbed far away neglect
blossoms unexpected 

richness the northern bog
violet reseeds its mauves 

across the bare gut plain
over the horizon 

that colours the receding evening’s gaze
neither malign nor benign.

Crohnic follows a loose trajectory of multiple poetry collections addressing issues of illness, whether short-term or long term, moving into elements of disability poetics articulated by prior titles including their own full-length debut, as well as Calgary poet nikki reimer’s [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010) [see my review of such here], the late Los Angeles County writer Hillary Gravendyk’s (1979-2014) Harm (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2012) [see my review of such here], Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s departures (Winnipeg MN: Turnstone Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Montreal poet Lauren Turner’s The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2020) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], the reissue of Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc’s I used to live here (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] and even Ottawa poet Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir, Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024) [see my essay on such here]. The structure of writing extended passages from one’s hospital bed, as well, is reminiscent of Dennis Cooley’s work during a hospital stay after a burst appendix (the central core of the collection departures), elements of which he first articulated across the “new” of his sunfall: new and selected poems 1980-1996 (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1996). Or, as Purcell writes:

But all the while, outside my window, winter goes on, teaching me how to rest. From my apartment perched in the trees of amiskwaciwâskahikan where I convalesce, where I look out onto the North Saskatchewan and her river valley, I learn how to wait. The trees lining the water lose their bulk and stand thin at the banks. The river freezes over with psoriatic plaque. Animals borrow, storing and hunting, knowing not to expend. Outside the city bogs and muskeg bubble, cradling that which slowly decomposes. Winter breathes slowly in sacred dormancy.

I am trying to learn an obvious lesson: everything is entangled in a relationship with life and death. Decay feeds life, and the non-human world does not seem to enforce strict division between these orders; life and death are both a kind of flourishing, co-creating possibilities. Winter puts us to sleep so we can be reborn. I take my prescribed and measured harms so that I can live more fully. The river flows, sheets over, changes state, and then

Anne F. Walker, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length

 

Settling In

Unbelievably small roomette and a lounge car full of light. Full of people, fields, the bay the delta. Just stepping off and stepping in. I have crossed this country with my father, with my mother and sister. With my son and his father. Driven across with furniture as I migrated, first one way, then back. No Wi-Fi on this train. Lifting from Rosedale passing homes with green kidney shaped pools. Dry grassland. A smell of croissant moving through the cars before lunch. Voices waft in snippets, talk about a small round house, internet, taking the train, walking to a sale.

I’ve been aware of Anne F. Walker and her work for some time, aware that she was in Toronto during her early publishing career, having relocated to Berkeley, California for her doctoral work at UC Berkeley, and currently living and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her latest collection is the prose poem suite Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length (Eyewear Publishing Ltd./The Black Spring Press Group, 2025), a collection that self-describes on the back cover thusly: “These 100-word prose poems are contained. They spread between sections. They break out into themselves. They repeat. They reflect on landscapes, bodies, travel, time, and rooted memories, concentrating on precision of image, narrative, and language.” Prior poetry titles by Walker, for those keeping track, include the full-length collections Six Months’ Rent (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1991), Pregnant Poems (Black Moss Press, 1994), Into the Peculiar Dark (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998) and The Exit Show (Kingsville ON: Palimpsest Press, 2003), as well as the chapbook when the light of any action ceases (Georgetown KY: Finishing Line Press, 2016).

The structure of a suite of “100-word prose poems” are an intriguing constraint, sixty-four poems grouped together into four sections: “The Train to Water,” “Hometown Return,” “Kaleidoscope Box,” and “Demeter’s Country.” Set as a loose travelogue through and between Toronto and San Francisco, the book exists geographically, even culturally, between these two distinct poles, set not as a linear straight line between the two, but almost offering the two locations where the author had lived to where she currently lived as a kind of counterpoint. “Knowing it has something to do with me,” she writes, to open the second of a run of nine self-contained poems, each titled “Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street),” “locked in the narrative. When he turns to me a sun shines. Dusk falls when he turns away. I disappear into a Pavlovian dark: a mouth of childhood swallowing me whole.” This is a book of memory, perhaps, across a suite of prose poems, offering points along the grid of her life. She writes experiences within each period, each place, with sidebar considerations in a cluster of “@Fifteen” poems that write of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, or working as a hostess “at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff,” for example. As that particular poem writes:

Just then leaving the hostess gig at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff after I’d been fired. On those mountain roads, the clarity of sunlight and clear mountain air. That breath where I just felt somehow a fleetly neurtral truth that I was still a child, and that I should not be out on the highway. With my thumb stuck out. that all my bravado was false. There isn’t as much narrative to that memory. A moment like the morning light on a truck and the crisp shadow it casts. The moment moved by me, and I kept hurtling forward.

The poems sit curiously between a narrative of unseen beginnings and overt conclusion, writing stealth and wisdom across quiet narratives of movement. The narrative impulse is somewhere in the realm of Lydia Davis fictions or the prose poems of Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected here], presenting a prose lyric rich in layerings and imagery, straightforward paths and hints of what may exist beyond the boundaries of each page. “An unease of ocean, large waves,” begins “Red Rock Beach,” “and of undertow pulling out to sea. Close to our towel the young slender couple dances half-dressed to invisible music. The wide ocean opens its wide mouth and waits.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dawn Tefft

Once Upon a Riot, Dawn Tefft’s first full-length poetry book, came out through Match Factory Editions in June 2025.  Dawn’s chapbooks include Gosling (Anhinga Press), Fist (Dancing Girl Press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark).  Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, and Fence.  She earned a PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review, and works as a union representative in Chicago.

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

My first chapbook, Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations, consisted of very short, lyrical poems that played a lot with language, sound, and repetition.  It was a project book focused on interrogating how my mother had come to live in poverty.  The length and style of the poems in my first full-length book of poems, Once Upon a Riot, varies a great deal, though it’s another project book, this one focused on the importance of resisting forms of oppression such as fascism and economic exploitation while also examining what it’s like to raise a child in our political moment.

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

 I suspect that I came to poetry first because I’m not a storyteller.  I prefer parataxis, ellipsis, juxtaposition, dreaminess, etc. over linear narrative.  I prefer suggestion over directness in writing.  I enjoy poetry because it’s a way of speaking that isn’t normally provided much space in life.  It’s a way of saying that is, when done well, always pushing at the borders of language, of what is sayable or knowable.  I think of it as being akin to theory in that it challenges the reader to co-author the piece by filling in the gaps.

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?

I used to spend a great deal of time revising poems, and I used to draw a lot on notes.  Now that I’ve been writing for so many years, it comes more quickly and requires less revision.  It always involves a certain amount of recursivity throughout the writing process, experimenting and changing things as I go, but the final revisions take less time now.  Having said that, I recently revisited a poem I wrote twenty-three years ago after moving to Seattle.  It’s stylistically different from what I write now, but I realized I still liked it.  I decided the end lines were in the way of the poem, so revised those, submitted it for publication and a few days later received word from LUNA LUNA Magazine, which publishes poems I love, that they were publishing it.  It’s up now in their December 2025 issue.  Sometimes you have to work on something for decades to get it just right.

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?

It depends.  Both/and.

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

I love public readings.  Although I prefer poems on the page over poems read aloud, I love the way that reading a poem out loud changes the poem and draws out different elements of it.  It’s kind of like how if you use light to examine a particle, it causes the particle to move, so you can’t ever know the original location of the particle exactly since looking at it makes it move.  Once you read a poem out loud, the original poem on the page has been transformed into a different poem.

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?

As I said in an earlier response, I think of poetry as being akin to theory in that it challenges the reader to co-author the piece by filling in the gaps.  So my concerns would be not to state anything too directly, because I want the reader to be challenged, I want them to find many different things in the poem, I want reading the poem to be generative of a reader’s own creative processes.  When I’m writing, I rarely have specific things in mind that I want to say; I know it’s a cliché, but I write to discover, to play, to unearth things from my own mind and from the possibilities inherent in language, rather than to say “X.”  However, when writing as well as when revising, I do have a sense of what’s emerging for me as a reader, and I will lean into that, clarify certain things, etc.  So it’s not that there aren’t things I’m aiming for at times, there definitely are, but those things become evident through writing.

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

I think writers bring beauty to a world in need of beauty.  Most of my favorite writing deals with painful or ugly subjects, but the writing itself sings.  It can also bring insight, foster empathy, and help us feel connected to each other and the larger world.  Art enriches the world, makes the world livable and even enjoyable at times for me.

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

I find working with an outside editor to be an easy process that strengthens my work.  Also, an editor is an audience, and it’s always helpful to know how an audience outside of yourself reacts to your work.

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

I don’t know if I’ve heard it as advice, but I think it’s important to write for both yourself and for an outside audience.  I always have my own pleasure and the pleasure of others in mind.  If I just focus on one or the other, I think the work tends to be less interesting.  I guess it’s important to balance your relationship with yourself, with others, with the larger world, with literary communities, and with language as a historical construct.  Not that you should constantly be aware of that balance, but you should resurface from time to time and dive back in with it in mind.

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?

My routine varies.  Sometimes I write when I feel compelled to write.  Other times, I make myself write.  I definitely don’t write creatively every day, though, and am pretty strongly opposed to the notion that one needs to write every day, which seems like it was probably more doable for more people back when the middle class was more robust. 

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

Other people’s writing, visual art, film, TV, the world around me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Incense, candles made with essential oils, my child’s sweat.

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?

Yes, I love film, especially slow cinema.  Think Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.  And now that there is finally a lot of what I consider literary-quality TV, I love that, too.  I think Severance is top notch.  I can’t fully grasp what’s going on in the surreal world of that show, and I love its elusive nature, though there is so much in the show that is of course familiar and grounds me in the world that they’ve created and which is, to an extent, a commentary on our working lives.  I love visual art and art that defies genres or is cross-genre.  I recently saw the Yoko Ono exhibit at the MCA in Chicago.  I’ve written some ekphrastic poems or poems just generally influenced by, or referencing, art.  It’s all part of the swirl that I’m moving through that is the context for my own writing.  And I think that both “high” art and pop culture make for great conversation partners.

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

Some works that I consider important: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Snow Part by Paul Celan, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. The Neapolitan Series by Elena Ferrante (starting with My Brilliant Friend) is hands-down the best work of literature I’ve encountered; it’s brilliant on both the micro- and macro-levels.  It’s just as attentive to nuances of emotional exchanges between friends and the inner workings of the mind as it is to global and regional politics and socio-economic systems.  And I’m loving the work put out by Match Factory Editions, the press that published my new book of poems. 

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

There are so many different project books that I’d work on if I had time enough.  I wish I could have hyper focuses for each book and work on them simultaneously.

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?

Well, I work as a union representative, and I used to be a college instructor.  I enjoy both of those occupations.  I’ve found that being a writer made me better at each of them.

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

I write because I’m compelled to write.  Because it’s both a need and a desire.  I like the intellectual and creative challenges it offers.  I like it as a form of expression, of exploration, of cognition.  I like how it problematizes the world as much as, or more than, it clarifies it.

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

I recently read the following books, all of which I enjoyed: Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis, All Fours by Miranda July, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Hood Witch by Faylita Hicks, Domestic Corpse by Paul Paul Martínez Pompa, and Concrete is More Beautiful Disfigured and Stained by Snežana Žabić.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Individual poems that come to me as they do.  Not sure what shape the larger projects will take yet, but I have a couple things in mind.  Currently considering writing a book of some very boxy prose poems and a book of some very airy lyric poems with lots of gaps to be filled in by the reader.  I want them to be very different projects.  I think most poets find a style and stick to it.  But I like to play around a lot.  I want to do all the things.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;