Ronna Bloom, In a Riptide

 

Immeasurable

Today a woman of no measurable age stopped me
to ask where she could buy some meat, and her eyes
filled up with tears when it seemed too far or impossible
and every shop was closed. I could do nothing but stand there,
vibrating in the hesitant spring. We were just to mere
meandering women in the empty street. Some of us
looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes,
others looking up, sending out our million help-me messages.
We stood there with nothing obvious passing between us
but time. Then she smiled and went away.
And I thought of the four people the Buddha met in his travels:
sick person, old person, dead person, happy person with nothing.
And I felt like all of them.

I was curious to go through Toronto poet and educator Ronna Bloom’s latest, In a Riptide (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), aware that she’s had a stack of published collections since I first discovered her work through her debut, Fear of the Ride (Ottawa ON: Carleton University Press, 1996) and follow-up, Personal Effects (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2000). She’s published a few more titles since those days, including the recent A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023). “I’m not just feeling,” the poem “Don’t Be Superficial, ‘Cause We’ll Soon Find Out” in this new collection offers, “I’m seeing. / And I’m here, committed to breathing, / joy, and painting, until there’s nothing left.”

Set in four sections of poems—“To Show the Scars: sick person,” “For Ten Billion Years: old person,” “The Earth Held Me: dead person” and “Don’t Close the Door to the Door to the Door: happy person with nothing”—as well as an opening poem, “Immeasurable,” In a Riptide is a book about looking, pausing, appreciating and seeing; a book on attending, on being attentive. “What do I look forward to?” she asks, as part of “October in my 62^nd Year,” “Metamucil in my gin and tonic, / a boiled egg in the morning, and a trail / of Werther’s candies in a lap around the park.” Composed as an assemblage of first-person narratives, Bloom’s sketchworks write on illness and age and all that comes with it, but resist lyric closure or expectation. “I turn to look at myself / and wait for one of us to speak.” she writes, to close the short poem “Area 3.” Or, two pages prior, as she closes the first of two parts of the poem “Vulnerable to,” writing: “I resist poetic redemption. Let it be this.”

There is something of the document, of a kind of meditative reportage, to Bloom’s lyrics, utilizing the space of the lyric to recollect, collect or leave one’s mark. “I need to write closer to the truth,” she writes, as part of the extended poem “The Party,” “not the wished-for truth. / To be roughed up a bit. Stop protecting myself from the end. / It’s an end not an ending.” Mortality is there, but it was always there, and this is Bloom, writing from within a particular moment, a particular period of time and of life, without urgency, but attempting a clarity and a comprehension, so that she might be able to move forward. “Please tell us, they said, if you will leave the light on,” she writes, as part of “Is It Safe?,” “if you’ll come back, / what you did here and with whom, / and will we be lovely, will we be lonely, / will we be lucky?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eve Luckring

Eve Luckring is a writer and visual artist living in Los Angeles on the unceded lands of Tovaangar. Her work questions the assumptions, and experiments with the boundaries, defining place, body, and habit. She is the author of Signal to Noise and The Tender Between, both published by Ornithopter Press.

Ig: @thetenderbetween / BlueSky: @thetenderbetween.bsky.social

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

Both my current book, Signal to Noise, and the first, The Tender Between, are accumulations of the fragmentary, contemplations on the incomprehensibility of an elusive whole. The writing approach however is formally quite different in each book.

Probably the biggest way The Tender Between changed my life was that I stepped out of the ever-faster-changing-technological-whir of lens-based media and instead spend more creative energy in words. For years, I integrated text into my artwork; over time, the poetry took on a trajectory of its own and kept going. I still make imagery; however, I love that I only need pencil, paper, and a simple laptop for the writing.

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

Poetry is a good fit for my non-linear visual thinking, comfortable shoes on a dance floor where words shimmy between thought and sound and image, the body fully engaged. Poetry taps readily into the gap between language’s power and its failings; I enjoy playing in this gap.

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 speed of development ranges from molasses to lightning for any given writing session. Every now and then a first draft holds its final shape, not too often. So far, the making of each book has been a slow process that involves many make-overs.

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?

Signal to Noise was conceived as a book from the get-go, whereas the poems in The Tender Between preceded any conception of a book. For me, poems begin from anywhere and everywhere. For example, in Part 1 of Signal to Noise I construct a refrain out of the word list format used in standardized audiological testing. Additionally, rhyme and sing-song rhythms seeped into the writing from years of nightly reading sessions with my aging mother. After her sight and cognitive abilities declined to the point where even children’s stories were too frustrating for her to follow, I turned to the nursery rhymes she read us when we were little and she enjoyed reciting them along with me. At that time I was struck by something poet and psychologist, Claire Wills, wrote regarding rhyme in relation to loss for an essay on Denise Riley’s “A Part Song” in the New York Review of Books : “Rhyme is substitution: something returns that is not quite the same, but that inhabits and holds open the place of the same.”

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

Reading aloud is crucial to my writing process and public readings allow me to share the music of the work as I hear it.

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?

Yes, there are general theoretical underpinnings to my writing (see question 15), as well as more specific musings that come with the undertaking and structuring of a book.

Signal to Noise uses mishearing to show how our interactions with others land inside us as a perception, an impression, an energy field that’s no longer contained by the other and becomes part of us because of how we take it in. I foreground the kaleidoscopic way experiences can radiate deep into our psyches, beyond the discreet boundaries of other selves, beyond the way we might frame one relationship versus another due to preconceived social convention. My aim is to re-create this locus rather than describe it. For this reason, I keep the various interpersonal relationships and “shes” undefined, partly for sound purposes, partly in an effort to plunge the reader into the unmoored emotional space of an overwhelmed nervous system— the “shes” blur and refract out of empathy, anxiety, exhaustion, and grief in order to activate an experiential tension in that slippage. I am trying to hold open for the reader the feeling space of not-being-able-to-fully-understand, not being able to 100% grasp what's in front of us. It is something most of us have personally encountered, uncomfortable as we are with it, and it seems all the more relevant to the times we are in (especially here in the U.S.)

With The Tender Between, the collating of individual pieces was an effort to answer a question: “What do all these short poems I’ve been scribbling over the years tell me about who I am?”— “poetry as the revelation of the self to the self” as Seamus Heaney put it.

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 think prescriptively about this. I do think writers can model quality attention and from there offer a myriad of meaningful perspectives back to the larger culture.

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

Working with an editor feels like a gift; I am grateful to have worked with Mark Harris at Ornithopter Press on both my books. Just as importantly, friends and colleagues assist as careful readers at different stages of a manuscript’s process.

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

The oft mentioned dictum that the best way to develop as a writer is to read, read, read and write, write, write.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to video to sound to photography to installation)? What do you see as the appeal?

The space of the in-between is endlessly captivating and generative for me. Examining the specificities of one genre usually offers illuminating perspectives on others. I spent many years reinterpreting traditional Japanese poetic forms into my visual art practice. One example, still available for online viewing, is The Juincho Video-Renku Book. By way of historical precedent (as some may already know) the Russian film-maker and theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, was influenced by Japanese haikai and tanka (as well as the ideograms used in writing it) when he developed his “montage” strategies for film editing. Later in his career when he started working with sound, he took inspiration from the techniques used in Kabuki theater. There is so much to say in response to this question; I will stop here. Suffice it to say, I live in the borderlands.

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 don’t have a rigid routine of when or where I write. I prefer to write early in the day whenever possible. I like writing outside and I try to break up my desk/computer time with walks that include a stop to sit with a notebook. How writing fits into my schedule becomes seasonally dependent due to the high heat of LA’s late summer/early fall and the varying amounts of daylight through the year which determines my time outdoors.

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

It usually takes a mix of quietude and new stimuli to get me back on track— I read. I go to the ocean, the forest, the mountains; I sit and stare into their environs. I walk. I look at art and film; go out for live music and theatre. I make images. I talk to friends about their work, or artwork and books we have both encountered. I visit new places locally; travel if possible. I research ideas that interest me in fields outside of writing. I listen.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Though this might sound cliché, a pot of chicken or vegetable stock simmering on the stove.

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 am influenced by all forms of art, especially the syntax of visual imagery and music from many different genres. Various realms of science, like botany and physics, offer structural models that fascinate me in their potential for adaptation to writing. I am someone who needs to spend regular time outdoors and the non-human languages I have observed there are inspirational to me.

And yes, of course, books. In the case of Signal to Noise, here’s some of what I believe informed the writing in crucial ways (beyond what is noted in the book itself and question 19 below): Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night, Myriam Moscona’s Negro Marfil/Ivory Black (translated by Jen Hofer), C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino’s Hearing, Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets, Fannie Howe’s Love and I, Jake Skeets’ Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Paul Celan’s Breathturn (translated by Pierre Joris), Brenda Hillman’s In a Few Minutes Before Later. I was also re-reading classic novels narrated through stream of consciousness, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Yūko Tsushima’s Territory of Light (translated by Geraldine Harcourt) and Samuel Beckett’s plays, e.g. Not I, as well as Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and Hotel World, Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air, Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (translated by Stefan Tobler) and Han Kang’s Greek Lessons.

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

I have spent many years studying traditional Japanese poetic forms (in translation.) I am particularly shaped by the blossoming of renku through Bashō’s innovations to the courtly renga form. Also, the 20^th century haiku poets writing jiyūritsu (free-form). Beyond that there is an eclectic range of writers, too numerous to list. This eclecticism itself I believe is important to my work.

The writing of third-wave feminists is foundational to my world view. I am deeply indebted to the work of philosopher and activist, María Lugones, with whom I had the chance to study while in grad school at UCLA. Also during my MFA years, post-modern theory was in its hey-day; I got a good dosing. Later, when working on various projects, I found resonance with the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and D.W. Winnicott.

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

To be able to converse fluently in ASL.

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 taught photography for 32 years. Now I am focused more on how I live rather than what I do.

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

I have always been a reader and, as a kid, that made me want to write. In my large Catholic family where almost everything (including books) was shared, writing was a private space to escape the fray, a chance to adventure unconstrained by the needs of the group. It was exhilarating. I actually also do the “something else” of visual art— working with the visual space of the page or a book is crucial to my writing process.

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

Poetry: Annelyse Gelman’s Vexations; Victoria Chang’s Obit

Fiction: Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over; Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

Film: Christiane Jatahy’s part film/part theater: What If They Went to Moscow?; Director Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am beginning an ode to the understory of a redwood grove which will be presented as a reading accompanying a friend’s film screening about the same.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Natalie Rice, Nightjar

How I Came to the Eastern Larch

Yes, I lived below.
I drank water, I ate stones. Storms
arrived from the southwest.
There was no damage, 

only the sky was as grey
as the sky over Bruegel’s hunting
dogs cresting a bank of snow. 

Every day, the ocean leapt
forward and back, and I did the same,
in love with a pewter wound— 

bicep seared by a grafting knife.
Meanwhile, winter promised gentleness 

and the house settled into a warmth
that could only come after
a year split by an axe. Rusted 

wetlands carried on below an edge
of skin, blue 

thistle, black rain. Outside
my tiny heart, deer slid
through the larches.

The second full-length poetry title by Natalie Rice, a poet recently relocated to Nova Scotia from Kelowna, British Columbia, is Nightjar (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), following her full-length debut, Scorch (Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], a collection I described at the time as having been composed through “a carved hush.” “How to stay with / what was hidden—,” offers Nightjar’s opening five-page poem “The Sea Rose,” “to clutch / hip to hip // with a hole to the heart / until the pitted cliffs / revealed themselves.” There is such a delicate precision to her lyrics, unselfconscious and thoughtfully, carefully set. Rice composes her poems as field notes, as sketches, offering carved lines on movement and landscapes, emerging through trees and farm spaces, turning her lyrics carefully between nimble fingers. As the opening poem continues: “Maybe there’s an ocean / behind the fog, I said / long before // we made new / weather and other forms / of breaking.”

I appreciate the way her lyric speaks from the edge of human occupation, of language, peering deep into the trees and the barrens. “To turn the mountain inside // out and wear it / against the skin. This is now // a love poem,” she writes, in the short piece “Anything May Take the Form of a Cup,” “but there is a town / on the edge of a fossil bed.” Set as a triptych of numbered sections, her poems are sharp, but not overpowering, providing a deep and abiding calm across loss, history and human distance.

In case you weren’t aware, or had forgotten, this is one of the final titles to appear through the original publishers of Gaspereau Press, before heading off into another east coast corner, under the stewardship of Keagan Hawthorne. I am curious to see what might shift, and what might remain.

this weekend! rob in toronto at the tifa small press fair + meet the presses' indie lit market,

In case you are around, I'll be (along with a mound of above/ground press titles + my new poetry title, the book of sentences) participating in two different small press fairs this weekend in Toronto:

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST: Toronto International Festival of Authors SMALL PRESS FAIR, 10am-5pm, Victoria College https://festivalofauthors.ca/event/small-press-fair-2025/

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND: Meet the Presses INDIE LIT MARKET, noon to 4pm, Cecil Centre, 58 Cecil Street, https://www.instagram.com/p/DN6d0WDDvUo/?hl=en

can you believe above/ground press is more than three decades old? new and forthcoming by russell carisse, Kevin Spenst, Lillian Nećakov, Jill Stengel, Cary Fagan and Rebecca Comay, Guy Birchard, Benjamin Niespodziany, Buck Downs, Jeremy Luke Hill, Mrityunjay Mohan, Kate Siklosi, Charlotte Jung and Johannes S.H. Bjerg, Eudore Évanturel (trans. by Jamie Sharpe, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jason Heroux, Ken Norris, Jon Cone, Ben Ladouceur, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Michael Sikkema, Laynie Browne, Nada Gordon, Stuart Ross, Ellen Chang-Richardson etc etc etc https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/

and i hear my new poetry title is amazing: https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781773856483/

drop by if you are able!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melanie Dennis Unrau

Melanie Dennis Unrau [photo credit: Jason Unrau] is a poet, editor, scholar, and climate organizer of mixed European ancestry from Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Red River Métis. She is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Melanie also co-edited I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood, 2025). Her latest title is Goose (Assembly Press, 2025).

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?

I don’t know if the first book changed my life—that was Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). I mean, I wrote the book about things that changed my life—almost becoming a parent, then becoming one. And I wrote it while I was doing a one-year MA program, researching and writing about feminist poetry about motherhood, and getting involved with a group of women visual artists I would collaborate with for the next ten years. And then it was published while I was working for a scrappy magazine I loved, but which I would soon leave to go back to grad school again. I suppose that book gave me credibility as a poet. It taught me I could write a book. It marked a shift from more typical prairie lyrics into something more experimental, and after it was published I decided to lean even more into visual poetry, found text, research, and collaboration. I’m super grateful for that book. Also, of course, the chapbooks I have published with you, rob, and elsewhere.

I think it’s funny that my first book was about motherhood and my new one, Goose, is in a sense about fatherhood. Both are feminist books, and this new one is more overtly anticolonial and antiracist. Goose feels different because the first book was very personal. Some of the poems in The Happiness Threads were impossible for me to read aloud because they were still so painful. Goose is intentionally and ironically impersonal. It’s difficult to read aloud for its own reasons—because it’s visual poetry and doesn’t always work that way. Although The Happiness Threads is funny at times, and it’s about a wide range of emotions, the dominant mood is quite sad. With Goose, the silliness is at the forefront, with deep critique and sadness in the background. Both books ask a lot of questions about what we love, and why, and how.

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

I honestly don’t remember. It’s just always been that way. I love reading, language, sound, and ideas. I had to memorize a lot of Bible verses as a kid, and I read a lot of flowery and archaic and difficult language as part of a strict religious upbringing. Maybe that? I remember writing playground rhymes, limericks, jingles, and parodies all the time when I was young. I used to believe that I could write pretty much anything, but I don’t think that anymore.

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 can write lyric poetry quickly. Early drafts of Goose were lyrics, written in the evenings while visiting “father of the tar sands” S.C. Ells’s fonds at the National Archive. Poems like that just come sometimes, and I jot and revise them in my journal, but I don’t really assume that they will turn into anything I would want to publish or turn into a bigger project. I’m glad I wrote those lyrics about Ells, capturing my strong sense of his presence haunting the archive, trying to control it even then. But those poems kind of got digested into the visual poetry, so that eventually I felt the project didn’t need them anymore. And the visual poems developed more slowly. rob, you published early drafts of these poems—the lyrics, then the word-processed found poetry that would eventually lead into the hand-tracing method I eventually figured out. It took a long time to land on what this project—or at least the book version of this project—would be. I don’t usually start writing poems with notes, but for this book I kept a list of concepts for poems on a sticky note inside a copy of Ells’s Northland Trails. It took several years for Goose to come together.

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?

Until I know I am working on a project or a book, poems begin as words, phrases, ideas that I put in my notebook (which I try to write in every night). I am best at making poems when I am busy doing other things like reading, editing, researching, etc. I am terrible at setting myself the task to create something when I have no idea what I want to write, and I hate doing creative writing on a computer. So I do a lot of rolling things around in my mind before I write them down. With both books, there came a moment when I knew I was making a book, and then things started to make sense. With Happiness Threads I knew at the same moment how I was going to make it—I listed out the titles of all the remaining poems I was going to write, and those would become the main part of the book. With Goose, it took longer to figure that out. Once I know what the project is and how to do it, I make one poem or more every day if I can.

Goose poems start as an idea about Northland Trails—like I’m going to find every adjective used to describe geese, or I’m going to make a deconstructive reading of this one poem that highlights how sexist it is. Then I start tracing words and images and see how my poem shapes up. If I make a mistake, or change the procedure/method for the poem, I start over. Each poem gets remade several times. Depending on how complex the poem is, each version can take an hour or longer.

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

I’m honoured to get to do readings, but I am a quiet and private person, and readings are challenging for me. I do like being part of a community of writers and readers, so I do them. And I do them to honour the work.

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?

Yes, always, but I try to keep these in the background—I’m not interested in writing theoretical or philosophical poetry. I would say I wrote Goose with literary-critical and environmental concerns. It is a reading or interpretation of Ells’s Northland Trails that does its work by making poems with and about Northland Trails. The questions it asks are questions like: What if Sid Ells liked to think of himself as a goose? How would I use his creative works to “prove” that, and what could I do with that evidence? What would it say about him? Do the geese or the land or the northern peoples in Northland Trails exceed or undermine what Ells tries to make them say, and how might I highlight those voices? What values and ideas and land relations were foundational to the tar sands industry, and are they still at work in the industry and in Canada today? What do we do with the legacies of “founding fathers” like Ells in the time of decarbonization and decolonization? Who speaks for the land? How can the image of this honking founding father serve as a warning or a corrective to the “great men,” grandiose plans and “nation-building projects” that are being sold to us today?

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?

It’s a writer’s job to pay attention, to reach for ways of expressing things that are happening right now in the world and in our cultures, and, while resisting silly or grandiose ideas about the impact of art or literature, to try to write ethically and in ways that matter. 

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

Both, but more essential than difficult. I would not publish a book without being edited, and I’m so grateful for the editors who have worked on my books with me—who have helped me see and fine-tune what the books are doing, and who have taught me so much. Much gratitude and love to you, Catherine Hunter, Clarise Foster, Jordan Abel, Andrew Faulkner, and Leigh Nash. And thanks to the other editors who alternately encouraged my projects along and rejected them when they were half-baked.

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

Jordan Abel said something in a mentorship session at a Banff Centre writing residency—something like “I would never take on a project that I couldn’t enjoy.” That advice changed Goose and my perspective on making poetry, even so-called experimental or visual or difficult poetry.

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

Easy. For me, poetry was an unintended byproduct of grad school and scholarly writing, editing, and publishing. I would write the scholarly version of what I was working through, but I would also be compelled to write the poetry version. Eventually, I learned to let the poetry infect the scholarly writing, and I wrote some neat creative academic work as a result. I think I’m finished being an academic now, and what I’m most proud of about my scholarly work is that I did it like a poet.

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 don’t really have one. I have never been only a writer—always an editor or student or scholar who also made time to write. I usually wait until I have an idea before devoting much time and attention to my creative writing. I used to go for a run to figure out writing tangles, and now walking every day is good for me and my writing. And I know it helps to write in my journal every night. I’m a neurodivergent person, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to focus only on one project. I will probably always do lots of other things, and those other things will somehow also help me write.

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

Hmm. The everyday? The world? Environmental activism? Or I read, or I throw myself into some other project or editing someone else’s writing. I don’t worry very much about this. 

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

I bought a box of cheesy, vintage homemade costumes at a yard sale, then wore the one my kids didn’t want to wear. I think it was a lion.

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 am not a bird-watcher, but I have paid more attention to geese while making Goose. I LOVE them, in a very unscientific and silly way. And I have visited the Athabasca River several times while making this book, also the Assiniboine River almost every day, so I think of my writing as being in relation or conversation with these beloved rivers. Visual art, especially by the artists I have collaborated with through Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in Winnipeg (Yvette Cenerini, Brenna George, Sandra Brown, Carolina Araneda, to name a few). Other influences for Goose include COVID-era Zoom meetings and podcasts, and lots of music (two songs to highlight: Tanya Tagaq’s “Retribution” and John K. Samson’s “Vampire Alberta Blues”). And the other forms I want to mention are DIY and amateurish aesthetics—zines, comics, the self-published, the protest poster or slogan or song.

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

Where to begin? And end? Books: Kate Beaton’s Ducks, Alvena Strasbourg’s Memories of a Métis Woman, Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, K.B. Thors’s Vulgar Mechanics, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Kazim Ali’s Northern Light, Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s Crow Gulch, Richard van Camp’s Godless but Loyal to Heaven, Evan J’s Ripping Down Half the Trees, Joanna Lilley’s Endlings, Matthew James Weigel’s Whitemud Walking, Owen Toews’s Stolen City, Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism. And writers: Jordan Abel, Madhur Anand, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jenna Butler, Dionne Brand, Di Brandt, Moni Brar, Warren Cariou, Rina Garcia Chua, Ariel Gordon, Stephen Collis, Marvin Francis, Samantha F. Jones, Katłıà, Kaie Kellough, Sonnet L’Abbé, Christine Leclerc, Cecily Nicholson, Jamie Paris, Shane Rhodes, Kelly Shepherd, Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Jennifer Still, Michael Trussler, Katherena Vermette, Joshua Whitehead, Rita Wong, Syd Zolf.

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

I would like to be a writer in residence. I will do that this fall at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. With that happening, and two books launching this fall, I honestly haven’t thought much further ahead.

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?

When I was young I said I wanted to be a librarian. That would work. I don’t know, I have already done a lot of things—communications work, university student services, magazine editing, journal editing, poetry editing, copy-editing and proofreading, teaching, research/scholarship. I’m focused now on attempting primarily being a writer for a change.

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

I write and do something else. But my something else is often pretty close to writing.

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

I’m reading Kate Briggs’s This Little Art right now. It’s fantastic. Before that it was Smokii Sumac’s Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine, which is powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking. I recently attended a screening of the film YINTAH and was blown away. Everyone in Canada should watch it, and it’s now on Netflix.

20 - What are you currently working on? 

I’m preparing for the launches of Goose and the poetry anthology I co-edited, I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis. I have a little chapbook project with one more sequence of poems about S.C. Ells. It didn’t fit with Goose so I set it aside to finish later (now). There is an ongoing research project with the McMurray Métis and Emily Eaton at the University of Regina that is related to Goose. I’m continuing my work as part of the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, including a public-art collaboration with visual artists Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies where we have been facilitating poster-making workshops that document the experiences of “wildfire season,” evacuations, smoke, and ongoing climate denial and delay in our province. And I’m getting ready to facilitate workshops on visual poetry and work-and-climate poetry as part of my upcoming writing residency.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Molly Bendall, Turncoat

 

and getting caught
on the border of night
politely I have to do it,
re-construct what I
didn’t want
to know, the cipher delivers
the living—the few and
their sentences flip and
swell up. I had no
treatment for it,
we couldn’t shield her
anymore, I know we’re
at cross purposes
as the heads of orchids
keep time, turn cheeks
an opening was sprung
by a latch near her dresser,
and a breeze falters inside
my sternum, letting
the slow dispatch begin (“That’s the Moon Trying to Leave the City”)

I’m immediately struck by such a wonderful tension of lyric tautness and nimble movement, the quicks and quirks of California poet and translator Molly Bendall’s latest full-length title, Turncoat (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025). Set in two sections, with a lengthy first and second as near-coda, the poems in Turncoat build into a kind of suite-cluster, offering poems and poem-extensions that accumulate, sweep and swirl across the book’s length, nearly as a single, fragmented, long poem. “when the crows / increase,” she writes, mid-way through, “it was time for / the sky to stretch / the group would never / surrender so I brought / the starving ones / milk, it helped them / burn a path / it’s not English / anymore, and when / her scarves rose / higher than the elms, / they snapped like shellfish / and filled it all with noise [.]” Bendall is the author of five prior collections of poetry: After Estrangement (Peregrine Smith Press, 1992), Dark Summer (Miami University Press, 1999), Ariadne’s Island (Miami University Press, 2001), Under the Quick (Parlor Press, 2009) and Watchful (Omnidawn, 2016), as well as co-author, with the poet Gail Wronsky, Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems) (What Books, 2009). In this new collection, Bendall writes a kind of epic, offering sharp and stunning threads of unease and upheaval, writing an undercurrent of tension and uncertainty, and building up the potential for conflict through the complexity of simply living in a world increasingly hostile, pervasive and surveilled. Hers is a syntax simultaneously quick on its feet and meditative, slow across lines that are somehow propulsive. “She understood it now,” begins the poem “Visualize Anyone,” “the cog behind her back, / celebrated it, even, / as her arms hung / down too far / her makeup too was amplified / feel the grooves / and teeth, if the cube / she lived in would break, [.]”

sophie anne edwards, A Mouth of Vowels

 

59. The baby rolls her head unevenly around the cervix. The mother ties her palms to a flock of birds feeding on burnt orange ash berries. If the cervix is a half-moon, will the baby be a girl? The midwife measures the cervix with the sound of an opening wing. If the midwife’s fingers span the width of a cervix, will blackbirds fly out of the pic? Will the pastry sprout o’s? the fingers of the midwife spreading open a cervix voice a loosening of questions.

The debut novel by sophie anne edwards, A Mouth of Vowels (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025), published through Stuart Ross’ 1366 Books, is a book that begins and opens with silence. It begins with an empty page, with a single footnote set at the bottom. The book begins with silence, offering footnotes to that silence on every page, a silence that offers shades and shapes and faded text in the main body of the page, until one realizes that the narrative sits in the footnotes themselves. “There are twenty-two steps from the yellow bedroom to the front door. The light under the door of the blue bedroom is a red fire. If his words craw like worms under her skin,” offers footnote thirty-two, on page twenty-three of the book, “will a cake rise when a hunter knocks on a door?” With more than four hundred footnotes in total across one hundred and sixty pages, the narrative of the book unfolds, unfurls, as slowly and as gracefully from dark to light as dawn, offering a slant and an undercurrent of violence and dark possibility. As footnote one hundred and eighty one writes, half-way through: “Each morning she blows on the baby’s stomach to release the worms. The worms she has gathered have spread from her skin to the baby. The baby’s fluttering hands spin strings of light that float around her mother’s head, a cocoon.” Writing a narrator through pregnancy and birth through such deep interiority, this is a book of sounds and slow movement, a book set in the margins, offering such gradual accumulation. After a while, the narrative-through-footnotes offers a kind of outline around the hints of an unseen centre, that perpetual silence, as a clear shape begins to emerge.

Following her full-length poetry debut, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024) [see my review of such here], there’s something far more lyric across A Mouth of Vowels, certainly far more than the poetic study of her river assemblage. There’s something of A Mouth of Vowels almost comparable to Sheila Watson’s classic novel The Double Hook (1959) for a requirement to reread, to attempt to catch what one might have missed on first reading, including hints of violence that finally can’t not be seen (again, like Watson). As footnote number three hundred and thirty-one offers: “Sometimes there are no answers. The answer is worse than the bullets, which are his fingers. Sometimes a baby should not be born where it germinated.” This is a remarkable book, and there is such a density to edward’s text, and a narrative composed somehow simultaneously straightforward and slant, all of which will reward the attentive reader.

80. Are steps toward a door the baby’s cries? Are steps away from a door the mother’s mouth? Twelve steps forward are a flock of birds. The sudden uplifting of wings from the ash tree is a heart. The feet at the door lift and settle, lift and settle. A grouse runs three times around the base of the cedar tree. She tucks the baby’s cries, which have startled the grouse, into the pastry. Her heart thrums in her throat. Her throat may be a grouse or the flight of birds. Twelve steps backward are a closed throat.
81. Nine months of gestation sometimes carries the same scent as wings thrumming across the sky.
82. The door is a knocking against the hand.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Robert Krut

Robert Krut’s latest book is Oh Oblivion, was released on October 15, 2025 and available here.  He is also the author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts (Codhill Press, 2021), The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (recipient of the Codhill Poetry Award, 2019), This Is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009).  He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies, and lives in Los Angeles.  More information can be found at www.robert-krut.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?

Like a lot of writers, I suspect, I was carrying around that first book for a while. Over the course of years, I would edit, revise, re-order, re-title, set aside, return to, and send out over and over again.  When I finally got it into true “book shape,” I was relieved, and happy, to have someone interested in putting it out.  So, in terms of “changing my life,” that vote of confidence was simply something I just really appreciated, and probably needed.  Also, it was simply a relief to set that manuscript, those poems, down, and begin to truly begin work on the next collection.  I felt free and energized.

 

As for how the most recent work compares to the previous, I feel like each book, while rooted in one world, always has a poem or two with an eye on the next—whether I realize it or not at the time.  So, there is always something of bridge between them, albeit a small one that maybe only I can sense. 

 

For each book, I have a sort of visualization in my mind of where I am standing when I read the poems, and that feels different for each collection.  One book will feel like I’m in a small nook inside our house, another will feel like I am pulled over on the highway, and another will feel like I’m standing on the moon. 

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

There’s a pretty straight line from becoming obsessed with Bob Dylan in high school, reading the back of his old album covers with their rambling poem/notes, and discovering Allen Ginsberg from there.  Once I read “Howl,” that was it—I was all in.  And while the Beats are a very specific school/style, the excitement I felt toward them fueled my interest in all forms/eras.

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?

First drafts of poems tend to come out like a huge lump of word-clay, relatively quickly.  Then, the process of shaping them into actual poems takes a while—sometimes, if I’m lucky, as short as a week, and sometimes, months.

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 always amazed by people who have a defined “book concept” from the get-go—at some point, I’d love to try that, but for me, it’s usually more of writing and writing until I hit a sort of critical mass of poems and step back to realize “this is where the book is headed,” thematically, stylistically, etc.  At that point, the realization of where the manuscript wants to go acts as a sort of spark to move to the end. 

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

I really enjoy readings--there is always a sort of energy surge that fuels more writing. Also, doing readings is frequently productive in that I often read poems differently than I initially approached them on the page, so it can be helpful to find that merging moment of idea, content, rhythm, and intent.  That’s why, even though it is nerve-wracking, I like reading brand new poems at events as it can really affect the revision process.

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 never know what the questions are at the start of a cycle of writing poems.  I tend to start writing, and somewhere along the line, the questions the poems are trying to answer become clearer, and at that point, the larger project starts to come into focus.  At risk of sounding melodramatic, it’s like entering a cave and feeling around for the walls and direction, and the farther I walk, I see a little crack in the surface with a sliver of light, and then maybe there’s a torch leaning against the wall, and then I’m in a room full of candles. 

 

As far as the current questions, it is a constantly evolving set of them.  There are the “Eternal-with-a-capital-E” questions, but then there are, obviously, questions that come with these horrifying times we’re in, as well.  I think we all try our best to address those, and there are as many ways to answer as there are writers.

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 believe writing, simply creating art, is the role, regardless of the size of your audience or how far it echoes out into culture at large.  Putting it poems out into the world is, in itself, a positive gesture.  There are other roles connected to that, of course--being a member of the literary community (how can I support and promote other writers?), and then being a writing citizen of your city, country, and world (how can my writing respond to what I see around me, and possibly even be useful?).  

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

I love working with an editor, or short of that formal designation, someone who can give you honest (sometimes blunt) feedback.  I don’t want to write in a bubble of my own making. 

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

Paraphrasing from years of advice: Read everything; read people who don’t write like you; cut, cut, cut; get over yourself; give yourself the freedom to change your mind; let people know when you love their work or what they’ve done for you as a writer. 

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?

The routine changes and morphs throughout the year(s), but typically, I try to start something right before bed at night—a few lines, maybe an entire draft, and then the next morning, take that and work on it as a poem.  As for how a typical day begins: start the coffee, stretch a bit while that brews, sit down to write for a while with that cup of coffee, try to not get distracted online, and when I feel like I’ve written to an exhale point, put on my glasses and then start school work, emails, and all of that.

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

There tend to be two main places I go to when feeling stalled out.  The first is the oldest advice we tend to get, which is to read.  For me, that means reading people who write entirely different kinds of poems than me.  I know the style I write in already, so when I’ve hit a block, I don’t need to read other poems that exist in that same universe/point-of-view/perspective.  I like reading books that are going to shake me up, get me excited, and show me things I’ve haven’t tried.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to try to write like those books, but instead, they rattle me out of being stagnant and get me excited about writing. 

 

The other move I like to make is to turn to friends who work in any of the arts.  For this new book, I was particularly lucky because I was in touch with two artist friends—one photographer and one painter—who were interested in collaborating.  T. Chick McClure, an incredible photographer, sent me some of his work which led to a handful of poems, and Linda Saccoccio, a wonderful painter, passed along a number of pieces which either sparked wholly new poems or helped me complete existing drafts.  These connections developed right when I needed a boost, and made a real impact on the writing. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
 

Home (growing up, New Jersey): pizza fresh out of the oven at DiMola’s Pizzeria on route 22 in North Plainfield, NJ; home (current, Los Angeles): sizzling onions and peppers on a hot dog cart outside of the Hollywood Bowl after a show. 

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, absolutely, other art forms play a major role in sparking ideas, keeping poems moving, and even forming manuscripts.  For the new book, I had two big influences outside of poetry-specific ones.  The first was David Lynch’s somewhat-recent Twin Peaks revival season, specifically the Purple Sea that appeared in episode 3.  When I started picturing this latest group of poems, I kept feeling like I was standing in those particular scenes, and they helped me move forward.  The other big influence was Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask—even more than the lyrics, which obviously he is known for, the music on that album is the sound I hear when I read these new poems.  Perhaps these are two clichéd, or obvious, references for a writer of a certain age, but they still move me to no end.

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

That list is so long, so I’ll focus on two people who were important as I worked on the new book.  My mentor from grad school, Norman Dubie, passed away in 2023, and his poems, and advice, were running through my head quite a bit as I worked on this new collection.  This will be the first time I’ve published a book and won’t be able to send him a copy, which was not lost on me as I remembered so much of advice working on new poems.  While studying with Norman, he introduced me to the poetry of his friend Michael Burkard, who wrote books that changed my way of viewing, appreciating, and ultimately writing, poetry.  Burkard also passed away recently—I never had a chance to meet him, but his influence is immeasurable. 

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

Write a half-hour network TV comedy.  

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?

DJ.  I know this is a rare job position these days, but sitting in a room playing music all day sounds like a dream.  More and more placing are starting to use AI DJs—I could make my stand as a human being with records, fighting the machine. 

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

To be honest, I don’t know that something else was ever really a question.  I just starting writing, and never stopped.  

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

I just finished Rivka Clifton’s Muzzle, which I loved—I am such a fan of her work, so I was looking forward to the collection, and it was fantastic.  I also really enjoyed Sara Mae’s chapbook Phantasmagossip, which came out as part of YesYes Books Vinyl 45 series—that series always publishes incredible collections, and I absolutely loved this one.  And this may be cheating, since I’ve read it many times before, but I just re-read Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, as I was preparing the reading list for my Fall classes—every single time I read it, I am floored.

 

Movie-wise, I finally saw Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, and I could not have loved it more.  It immediately shot into my top five all-time favorites.

19 - What are you currently working on?
 

In an effort to clear my head for these questions, I was just outside to trim the rose bushes.  So I guess, the garden?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;