Ottawa/Toronto ON: I’m always intrigued to see collaborations, especially from poets of whose work I am already fond, so was pleased to see Amanda Earl [see my review of Earl’s latest here] and Matthew Walsh’s [see my 2025 interview with Walsh here] call-and-response collaboration Slutflowers (Toronto ON: knife fork book, 2026). “I have this concern with my own death / that I feel in my bones,” begins the poem “Scythe and Fate,” “especially it has / taken up a spot in my ilium bone, placed / above my acetabulum. I feel that it’s / a poet’s job to think of the existential, mark / down that what confuses me into a notebook which / I can burn before my death or not.” Slutflowers is an assemblage of short poems composed via a technique borrowed from American poet Terrence Hayes, “a technique of using words from an existing work for end words of a poem.” Gestural, performative and sly, these are poems riddled with self-conscious desire composed via constraint and resistance, even as they allow themselves to not follow their own rules. “I am missing some of the lines on my hands / for palmistry. I drink out of them,” begins “Palmars,” “cupped / below the faucet, from the heart and life over / and over ad nauseum.” As Earl offers in the acknowledgments, writing: “Matthew approached me with this method as a way of writing our collaborative chapbook. I suggested we use as our source, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (1963), one of my favourite deviant resources. We assigned each other ten random pages. If we felt like it, we responded, in some way, to each other’s poems.” And while one might speculate on which poet composed which piece or pieces, as a straight back-and-forth between the two, I think there is something to be said for refusing to place any poem with one over the other.
Scattered
Tonight dear reader, I am
tired of being wooden.
A man I met writes to me
of dude books which are effigies
I’d like to burn because
how often I feel other
by my lack of inclusion
and am just one of the masses
of women disappeared by
the canon as if we are the same
nothings not as sweet as
these dudebros want us to be but
fundamental
to their nonsense is all
of this resentment.
We don’t have the luxury
of being contemplative.
They relegate us to
quietism.
I wish them the same.
Toronto ON/Fredericton NB: The latest from poet Ambrose Albert is the chapbook cross/faded (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a collection of twelve sharp-edged first person lyrics. “they call the phenomenon ‘the brain zaps.’” begins the short poem-burst, “coup de foudre,” “I call it the air before a thunderstorm. / metal on your tongue. scent more / ozone than petrichor. harsher. / you’re all sweat and dizzy / from the buzz. the crackle of it.” Albert’s lyrics hold the tone and tenor of monologues, quietly performed, but performed nonetheless, holding gesture and truth across carved lines of syntax and angles, including the poem “top surgery and it’s completely different but also still / top surgery,” that includes:
it’s theorized the
missing appendages from Greco-Roman statues
were a result of censorship.
everyday wear and tear. trans ancestors
entrust me a chisel,
there’s an angel in the marble to be freed.
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