12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christina Shah

Christina Shah lives in New Westminster and works in heavy industry. Her work was shortlisted for 2021’s Ralph Gustafson Prize and selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2023. rig veda was her first videopoem and chapbook (Anstruther, 2023). if: prey, then: huntress (Nightwood, Fall 2025) is her first full-length collection.

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 was an illuminating process. Plus, I made some new friends! I’m very grateful for the support I received from Robert Colman (my editor), and Jim Johnstone at Anstruther Press, my poetry collective, Harbour Centre 5, as well as from my colleagues, customers and suppliers in the industrial world. It was also an opportunity to connect with some of the poets whose work I’d admired for many years. I felt like a real writer once I had something tangible to hold in my hands– I’d realized my dream.

My most recent work, if: prey, then: huntress is a full-length collection. Compared to rig veda (my chapbook), there is some overlap in terms of content, but IPTH is an eclectic collection (work and play poetry!). During one of our conversations, Rob said ‘a chapbook is like a room in a house’. The light went on for me (and yes, someone was home!).

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

I came through the work of Dennis Lee, as a child. The irreverence is what did it for me. Poetry seemed supercharged in terms of its humour, its whimsicality (and certainly its musicality) and the naughtiness of its child characters.

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?

In my case it’s how many fits and starts? It’s a very slow process. I frequently use the word ‘woolgathering’ to describe it. ‘Hairy tumbleweeds’ might be a more apt metaphor— pricklier and more random, and over rougher terrain. I do a lot of research while writing, but mainly for technical reasons (which invariably ends up down internet rabbit holes). First drafts usually need to ‘have legs’, as I like to say—in the form of a spark of sound or an explosive image or even unusual subject matter, used as a prompt. Then there’s a moderate amount of editing (longhand) on the printed first draft.

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?

For me, a poem begins with a sensory snippet, or an image (could even be a mundane scene or a utilitarian object), or a far-out sound combination that begets an unusual image (see #3). That’s the flashpoint. I’m definitely in the former camp.

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

I’d say they’re part of my creative process. I do enjoy doing readings and connecting with the audience. The in-between banter and the backstory adds some connective tissue and colour that is unique to an in-person reading, much like a live music event.

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’m seeking meaning within and beyond the world of work. How can we carve out some time and energy for ourselves to be present but not enmeshed, especially in this age of technological acceleration? What do we show of ourselves beyond our roles or our scripts in commercial or institutional environments and interactions? How do we as individuals maintain our humanity and agency in dehumanizing environments or situations? Why are there still places and networks in which women’s participation and access to opportunity is limited? How do we maintain our connection with the tactile world? How do we keep craftsmanship and repair knowledge alive in the age of enshittification? Most of my questions are questions of agency.

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?

The writer holds up a mirror, shows us our humanity, and helps us hang on. They demand courage and honesty and are willing to put themselves on the line for all of us. I think we need writers more than ever these days, especially when books are being banned and we’re living in a sea of propaganda and AI slop. I’m reminded of the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes, who was purported to have wandered around in public spaces in broad daylight with a lit lantern, claiming he was ‘searching for an honest man’.

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

Essential. I’ve been so fortunate in this regard. I’ve had the privilege of working with both Rob, and Peter Norman (who edited if: prey, then: huntress). Nightwood also treated IPTH gently but with great attention to detail. Their perspectives were very helpful in ordering the manuscript and also in determining which poems to keep and which to leave out.

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

“Well-behaved women rarely make history.” More of a pithy quote, which I took as advice!

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?

I do three pages of free-writing most mornings before work (and on the weekend), but I don’t have a set routine. A typical day begins with very strong coffee and plant care. When I have time after freewriting, I do like to read the LCP’s Poetry Pause poem or watch a videopoem.

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

There’s always reading other poets’ work, as well as knitting/crochet or baking. Making things usually sets off another writing streak. Taking a walk helps. I’m a fan of using prompts in group settings as well.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My husband’s cooking, specifically his spaghetti bolognese sauce. It’s out of this world. I’m very spoiled.

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?

So many influences. Food, music (specifically 70s rock), and visual art, the urban environment, geology, astronomy, and mechanical engineering concepts/terms.

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

I try to read as much industrial work poetry as I can, so Kate Braid, Tom Wayman, Lindsay Bird, Garth Martens, and Joe Denham, to name a few. I’m interested in discovering more Spanish language poetry by women writers. I also enjoy the literary journals— it’s always interesting to leaf through and to discover a new writer, or a new piece by someone whose work you enjoy.

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

I’d like to visit Spain and walk everywhere, especially on the Galician coast. Art, architecture, great cuisine and natural beauty!

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?

I’d try being a cardiac surgeon, although that does not really qualify as something you dabble in— and you can’t really wing it. My guess is I’d probably still be in sales or a small business owner importing Nice European Things (either edible or wearable).

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

It was the one thing I could do well, and I loved words and books from an early age. I could take them with me wherever I went. Reading and writing became a lifeline as a child and as an adult.

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

Book: Lauren Peat’s chapbook Future Tense (Baseline 2024). It’s stunning. ‘Aubade at Olympic Station’ begins with the line ‘I wake to split the blue milk of morning with the cat who haunts my building’. Musically-rich (Peat is a composer as well– and draws some inspiration from the work of Glenn Gould), this work is a kaleidoscopic meditation which reflects on many facets of vulnerability: intimacy and distance in relationships, homelessness–‘the man curled into a comma by the TD Bank’, even a newborn baby after a difficult birth.

Film: a beautiful, five-minute videopoem about the aftermath of the end of a relationship ‘El fin de la existencia de las cosas/The end of the existence of things’ by Dalia Huerta Cano. Just watch it.

19 – What are you currently working on?

More hairy tumbleweeds for the next book. The work world offers plenty of material!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress

 

pinky laundry

their dirty custard ranks
present a row of grooved tongues crooked
for a six-quarter shakedown
with a thin rinse 

pregnant, trembling, spinning
boxing bloodied socks and jeans
punishing the textile transgressions
of poor days dodged 

into the side-gyre
mesh drum tumbling
but chaos rising in five-minute increments 

here, we’re our own hunchbacked bellmen
wheeling out low-slung carts
below entombed fluorescent bars
Charons ferrying terrycloth,
folding the rabbled souls.

I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Writing origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]”

dear Rudyard

Well, the twain met—
not at the gates of Vienna
nor on a date at the Prater,
but in an artificial city
by Trudeaumanic accident. 

I learned to make killer Vanillekipferln—
blond almost dust and cultured butter,
gorgeous orchid’s wizened finger buried
in bright sand to dispense
migration’s black grains. 

I learned to consume my mezzaluna origins
in time for Midnight Mass—
marveled at the old man’s Sunday absences;
the porcine avoidance
of his distant past.

Through the poems that assemble into if: prey, then: huntress, the poems still seem to feel out their coherence into a larger structure, providing a looseness I’m curious to see evolve into whatever she attempts next. Ultimately, through if: prey, then: huntress, concerns and descriptions of labour are set as foundation, or as perpetual backdrop, but it is through the flourish of sound and rhythm that the poems sparkle, find their ultimate magic across the grounding of the concrete floor. As she writes as part of a statement, posted recently as part of the “Spotlight series”:

There’s a surprising amount of colour and sensory detail in some of these industrial environments– at least that’s what I try to highlight in my work. Buff yellow, UV-faded hunter green, and blazes of colour from the tugboats or safety gates and stairs. I like to explore the contrast between the built and the natural environment while enjoying the view and the people along the way– one of the perks of what can be complex and dangerous work.

 

Spotlight series #113 : Christina Shah

The one hundred and thirteenth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson and Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

our reading brings all the poets to the yard : Vancouver, part two

[see part one here] What a stunning event in Vancouver! Christine and I read recently via Poetry in Canada at Simon Fraser University, thanks to the machinations of Stephen Collis and Isabella Wang. After my prior post, in which I was attempting to list my other Vancouver events over the past few years, Diane Tucker reminded me that I went through Vancouver in 2010 (I know I was once or twice a year from 1997 to 2006, but anything beyond that I hadn't the notes for), which would have been a Talonbooks event, most likely the one at Anza Club where I read with bill bissett and Adeena Karasick, touring around a bit with the two of them (including in Edmonton, and I think Calgary). That was a good trip. The same venue they had John Newlove read in 1999 for the chapbook I produced of his (I was fortunate enough to be in town for such), being his first time back in Vancouver reading in fourteen years (that was quite an event, on multiple levels).

[above: rob and Geoffrey Nilson; left: rob and Mckenzie Strath] I've been enjoying the evolution of Christine reading from Toxemia, maybe a half dozen times or more by now, each reading more vibrant than the prior (the book really has to be read and/or heard to be believed; did you see the essay I wrote on it?). Collis referred to us as a poetry "power couple," which is hilarious and strange, and also asked anyone in the room published through above/ground press to raise their hand (at least half the crowd, which was startling, in a certain way). The event held a standing-room only crowd, packed with some of the best of what Vancouver poetry has to offer, including Scott Inniss, Rob Manery, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Christina Shah, Fred Wah and Pauline Butling, Daphne Marlatt, Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Fiona Lam, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Geoffrey Nilson, Michael Turner, Diane Tucker, Heather Haley, Peter and Meredith Quartermain, Jen Currin, Jami Macarty, Brook Houglum, Aiden Chase, Phinder Dulai, Mckenzie Strath, Rahat Kurd and plenty of others (with a handful of regrets, including Anne Stone, who it would have been lovely to see (has it really been twenty years? and twenty-six since we toured Canada together?), and Thor Polukoshko, who I will have to meet at some future visit. An incredibly warm and supportive crowd. And we even sold books! It was also exciting to meet a handful of poets I hadn't yet met in person, including at least half a dozen above/ground press authors.

[above: Christine + Christina Shah and her amazing coat of many colours; left: Scott Inniss and myself, closing out the evening; an awesome reminiscent of Kevin Stebner] And for drinks, also, landing at a pub I know for certain I'd been to before, being the first place (after which reading I do not recall) I met Lisa Robertson. When was that? We got to hang with Manery, Collis, Lusk (a descendant of the Lusk who named Luskville, Quebec, I'll have you know; the location Monty Reid wrote of in The Luskville Reductions), Wang, Shah: absolutely grand. Isabella thought I was imaginary and magical! And I've honestly thought her completely the same, if we're being honest. Did you know a second full-length collection is out soonish? I have shirts I still wear older than this kid; how is her work so damned good?

The following morning allowed a quiet few minutes at Sylvia's Bar downstairs with the books I picked up from The Paper Hound--Patrick Lane's Winter and Kevin Killian's posthumous Selected Amazon Reviews--before breakfast with Vancouver poet (and above/ground press author) Renée Sarojini Saklikar, who wasn't able to make the reading. Oh, she is delightful. And we got to hear some good stories about her growing up the daughter of a United Church minister, including in parts of Quebec, just north of Montreal.

After breakfast, Christine retired to our room, and I headed downtown to catch a conversation with Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and Nastaran Saremy to accompany a show there by Sniderman, and meet up with American poet Deborah Poe (another above/ground press author, although I think we're due for another chapbook soon), who was in town for same. Can you believe it has been twelve years since I've seen her, back when we first met in Ottawa? Sniderman's show, including video footage, and conversation were extremely interesting, as he spoke of walking in terms of solidarity (very different from the Vancouver Walking of Meredith Quartermain's flaneur, or the British tradition of 'walking,' as articulated through such as Mark Goodwin's Steps); as the British tradition evolved into an acknowledgement of owned, preserved space, Sniderman's project comes out of attempting to counteract erasure, acknowledging solidarity with workers, the revolution and the tensions of unmapping. His is an anti-colonialist project to restore knowledge to what had been deliberately revoked. The core gesture of the project is of the settler refugee, he said, listening to the shared land. [I am possibly mangling some of the intentions around this project, so I recommend you look up his work and see for yourself]

[Deborah Poe and myself, at Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University] Deborah Poe had to get back home, and wasn't sticking around, which was a bit disappointing. So from there, I wandered a bit; there had been a plan to meet up briefly with Clint Burnham (another above/ground press author, you know), but that got pushed until later, so I wandered, and headed over to MacLeod's Books, a perpetual favourite and a Vancouver institution (but couldn't find anything there I might have needed). For years across the late 1990s and into the 00s I visited there, picking up numerous titles to add to my reading list, although I think my requirements have shifted over to what The Paper Hound currently offers.

Hey, there are the mountains! I remember those mountains. Those! Over there!

After heading back to the hotel (finally), I met up with Vancouver poet Ivan Drury and his young lad (they wandered over by bike after the lad woke from his nap), as we walked along the beach at English Bay for a bit (the view was spectacular--I'm not used to seeing so many boats, let alone the big transport ships--but there was a chill in the air), but then decided to get back into Sylvia's Pub for a drink and a bite, which the young lad quickly warmed to. He had much to say, you know. And colour. And doesn't Ivan have the kind of smile that would light up any room? He had some interesting thoughts on work poetry that I'm hoping he expands on (he's currently working on a piece for periodicities on same, which I'm very looking forward to seeing). He even gave me some chapbooks! I always appreciate that.

Christine eventually met us downstairs as we were soon to head over to Rob Manery's house (another above/ground press author; he's reading in Ottawa this weekend!) to have dinner with Rob, his partner Robyn Laba (her day-job and her artistic practice both sound fascinating, honestly) and their teenage lad, with a brief drop-in by Burnham, which was good. Why didn't I take any pictures of that? I was probably talking too much. I always want to ask Burnham about the late, lamented 1990s newsprint publication boo magazine he was involved in (there never seemed the right moment, the rare times we've been in a room together over the past twenty years), as I was quite fond of the few issues I saw. Whatever happened to that? What was that all about? I have many questions.

And then the next morning, as our direct plane cancelled, so had to head home through Toronto instead (and landing home at least three hours later than originally planned), which got us home just in time to catch our young ladies for bedtime.

Ongoing notes: late July, 2022: Ryan Fitzpatrick’s ENGC86 + the Harbour Centre 5

I’ve always been fond of writing group and/or workshop chapbooks. Seymour Mayne used to produce annual chapbooks from his workshops at the University of Ottawa, going back to the 1970s, I believe; and I think Irving Layton produced at least one during his time at York University (around here somewhere I still have a copy that Robert Kroetsch handed me, produced by himself after a session at Sage Hill): a collection of poems by the various participants in that particular group. Recently, two different chapbook titles have landed on my doorstep (what I am saying here is: mail me copies of these things; I like these things and am open to discussing them), so I thought it might be fun to discuss them together:

Toronto ON: From Ryan Fitzpatrick’s ENGC86 Creative Writing: Poetry II, the spring 2022 class at the University of Toronto Scarborough comes The Girls Who Get It, Get It (Toronto ON: Block Party, June 2022). As Fitzpatrick’s “Foreword” offers:

At the beginning of the semester, I tasked this group of promising writers with the problem of the poetry project. In other words, I asked them to tell me what they wanted to write about and we’d hash out the how and the why together. We’d grapple with the three corners of a questionably drawn Venn diagram I threw up in the middle of a Zoom call. We’d concern ourselves with form as an extension of content and content as an extension of relation. We’d move from the problem of just how to approach the villanelle to the explosive narrative possibilities of a million internet forms. We’d occasionally ask the dreaded question “So What?” like someone was about to go down for elimination in the MasterChef kitchen. We’d move between narrative flows and imagistic surprise. Eventually we reached the oft repeated refrain “The girls who get it, get it” as a way around the complex and sometimes messy specificities of our poetry, because life is messy and not everyone will understand everything all the time, but you also have to have faith that what you write will find the audience who has been searching everywhere for the right words at the moment they needed them.

The collection includes writing from Isla McLaughlin, Mary Maliszewski, Shanti Dhoré, Catherina Tseng, Morgen Mulcaster, Regina Zhao, Timea James, Sonika Verma, Georgea Jourjouklis, Alexis Murrell, Kasthuri Kanesalingam, Uniekar Bacchus, Lamia Firasta, Rana Sulaman, Alexa DiFrancesco, Victoria Butler and Joseph Donato. “share that quote from / Maggie Nelson,” Isla McLaughlin writes as part of “is this what it means to be a girl online?,” “hope at least one / person recalls // your crying, it’s / intensity // continue to / suffer so loud [.]” “it’d be so sweet if things just stayed the same,” Alexa DiFrancesco writes, as part of “when mom is ukrainian,” “do you know who you are?” There is such a lovely mix of confidence, swagger and curiosity through the poems assembled here, each of them reaching out in their own ways into attempting to get a handle on writing, thinking and where this all goes. As much as anything, also, it is the range of styles that intrigues about this small collection. “But they’re not available at 11:50pm,” Lamia Firasta writes, in “Assignment: 11:59,” “When I am checking all my citations / And wondering if there’s an i in lowercase [.]” I am intrigued by the narrative leaps and associations of Sonika Verma’s “Kaleidoscope,” a piece that begins: “to this day my bank pin number is my middle school friend’s / birthday. every winter i bake a cheesecake the way a bakery which / i haven’t gone to in four years advised me to. my pajamas are a / worn-down shirt from high school volunteering of an event that / relocated.” Or the first half of Catherina Tseng’s “pear-shaped ladies,” a poem that includes some very sharp phrases and observations:

scar-slicked thighs stick to the bottom of the plastic chair,
twisting uncomfortably as white men walk with their asian
girlfriends. at starbucks a girl with small tits and sweat-stained
armpits browses for swimwear on amazon. her mid-range crop
top says that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism
as she clicks clicks clicks lrg tankini two-piece red women’s sexy
cute high-waist tie knot into the cart. body knows nothing. only
instinct and survival and potential and nerve. body is divine.
gooseflesh rises along roadmaps of stretch marks and cellulite,
charting rivers, climbing mountains, marking crossroads,
claiming territories. a god is just a baby.

I am hoping to see more work by these folk; I am curious to see where they might go. I also have an extra copy of this, if anyone is interested. Otherwise, check here.

Vancouver BC: I recently received a copy of the chapbook Brine (2022) by Vancouver’s Harbour Centre 5. I hadn’t been previously aware of this particular writing group, although I’m aware of at least two of their members (I interviewed Christina Shah through the “Six Questions” series, and both Shah (posted June 16, 2021) and Robbie Chesick (scheduled for August 23, 2022) have poems in the “Tuesday poem” series). As Shah’s opening poem, “dig in,” begins:

learn to become lignin
living, but stiff
the interdependent men
will talk
over you
at you
about you
object, topic

nascent agent

put your roots down
and pretend

the storms are normal

The poets collected here are Christina Shah, Jaeyun Yoo, James X. Wang, Rebecca Holand and Robbie Chesick, all of whom, according to their author biographies, have been emerging in a variety of literary journals across Canada, but haven’t yet chapbooks or full-length collections. There is a nice narrative bob and lyric bounce to the poems of Jaeyun Yoo, such as the final stanza of the three-stanza “a woman of water,” that offers:

most days, she scurried past and went to bed
a tadpole hiding under clumps of mud
another day, I had to wrest the bottle away
and watched her balter, like cattails lurching
their swollen heads back and forth
some days, she nibbled the sandwich crust
curled around me as if a warm palm to a cup
then I would finally lean my weight
boulders in her water, briefly buoyant

As they write at the back: “Brine is a collaborative chapbook created by Harbour Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets who met through Simon Fraser University’s Weekend Poetry Course. They craft poetry with a process akin to brining—words submerged, cured, until rich in flavour.” Dedicated “to our mentors, Fiona Tinwei Lam & Evelyn Lau,” I’m reminded of when I was first introduced to the work of Newfoundland writers Michael Winter, Lisa Moore and others, through a group anthology self-produced back in 1994, the culmination of nine years of self-directed workshopping a group of emerging writers had managed, after their creative writing class had ended. It is, as they say, possible to get there from here.