VERSeFest begins tomorrow! & interviews w Dial, Avasilichioaei, Weaver, Hiemstra, Paige, Hall + Whittall,

We already know you're excited about the fifteenth anniversary edition of VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival, which begins tomorrow night at Club SAW. Eileen Myles! Zoe Whittall! Kimberly Quiogue Andrews! Rebecca Kempe! King Kimbit! Chelene Knight! Pamela Mosher! Terese Mason Pierre! Bridget Huh! Sara Berkeley! Stephanie Roberts! etc etc etc. As part of such, we've been working a series of pre-festival interviews with an array of performers for this year's event, all posted online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (with a whole slew posted last fall and last spring as well, as part of prior festivals; scroll back here to catch them all).

rob mclennan : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Em Dial ; nina jane drystek : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Oana Avasilichioaei ; rob mclennan : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Andy Weaver ; Amanda Earl : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Jessica Hiemstra ; Jen Jakob : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Salem Paige ; rob mclennan : Doubt is Form : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Phil Hall ; Amanda Earl : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Zoe Whittall ;

and tickets are still available! and there are even some free events, including Friday noon, when Eileen Myles reads at Carleton University, or Saturday's reading at The Manx Pub! donations welcome, also.

Em Dial, In the Key of Decay

 

Mamestra Brassicae

In the early spring, cabbage moths bloom,
a likely target of coos from my students,
whose hands I hold as I reach them the word
pupae. What an agent of evil I am, to dash
their hopes of the swarm drifting across
drafts of love, like Monarchs. The white
flock has descended on our broccoli,
our brussel sprouts, our collard greens,
to unleash a tsunami of hungry mouths
and I can’t lie to them. They aren’t butterflies.

I’m just now seeing a copy of Toronto-based poet Em Dial’s [see their ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] full-length debut, In the Key of Decay (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection of lyrics held in monologue, gesture. I’d seen Dial’s poems recently in Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025) [see my review of such here] and was impressed, although I’d even think their poem included in that particular anthology a direction I’d like to see further. Their poems in this collection are a narrative blend of performative and meditative, offering elements of beauty and decay and everything between, amid and through, a collection, as the back cover offers, that “pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history.” “In my worst nightmares,” the poem “On Beauty” begins, “I am pregnant / my body swelling out / with a demon        but a small task to country. // Just as when awake, I am begging / myself into a somewhere        thumbing / my ribs for the definition of country / other than the two blue passports / kissing in the desk drawer.” The poems in In the Key of Decay are declarative, considered. In the Key of Decay is a solid opening, and I’m intrigued by Dial’s formal considerations, pushing against the boundaries of lyric constraint, but one open to further possibilities (such as their poem in Permanent Record, which does move into some really interesting structural territory). The poems are smart and wild and restrained, offering elements of fantastic monologues and short scenes and lines that lean into the musical, as “Lost in the World” offers:

My chest ticks          to the rhythm

of a frenzied compass.          Where are we again?

Maybe all the generations          dressed in

Immigration because lost         and          love

are as universal as          a drum beat.

 

PERMANENT RECORD: Poetics Towards the Archive, ed. Naima Yael Tokunow

 

            Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly a decade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof), and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and my culture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives. These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers and oral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records are missing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher. Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “full story,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded for reinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies. Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, our people, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
            And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kind of pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hard questions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pull blood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawed systems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archive allow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Through this reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
            Permanent Record wants to reimagine who is included in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy of preservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms of knowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for this perfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can be counted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how. (“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory, and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)

Newly out is the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), edited by Albuquerque, New Mexico-based writer, educator, artist and editor Naima Yael Tokunow. Since being announced as Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow back in 2023, Tokunow has put together an impressively comprehensive anthology on loss, reclamation and the archive, working to gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise be lost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and because and even despite those losses. “you spend a lot of time thinking about loss,” writes Minneapolis poet Chaun Webster, as part of “from WITHOUT TERMINUS,” considering if what is missing has / a form, wondering if there is a method to tracing what is not visible. there was / a time when you thought that if you just had greater powers of imagination, or / if you could somehow place yourself securely along the tracks of family and / cultural history that you could gather sufficient evidence, collect all the bones / to make something of a complete structure.” Across a spectrum of lyric by more than three dozen poets, Permanent Record speaks of a range of cultural and personal losses, from a loss of language, home and family, reacting to colonialism and global conflict to more intimate details, writing against erasures both historical and ongoing. There is an enormous amount contained within these pages. “In the obits mourning the billionaires,” writes Hazem Fahmy, a writer and critic from Cairo, in “THE BILLIONAIRE / (ARE YOU BOAT OR SUBMARINE?),” “it is mentioned that they paid / $250k to die before the eyes of the entire world // a laughably cheap ticket / compared to the cost of carrying // a child onto a floating grave. Whose mercy / would you rather stake your life on? The ocean’s?”

On the back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology that reimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity, language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, this collection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When the ceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,” writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handful of poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of the sequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “though it’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams / made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” The anthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are based in or through the United States and further south (with at least two contributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in this anthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when one considers that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but a single full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansive list of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; one would think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be reading next, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirely that. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” by Em Dial, that reads:

QUADROON (adj., n.) language of origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron, or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at the way they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not the haystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lake are isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and again and again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.

The anthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILE NOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, as Tokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyric map legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of the framework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, is intriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven and propelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (part of me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knows well how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the final section, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune folds us up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup against our drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flat daylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand, spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling off the page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelings bounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,” as held in that same closing section:

the curse is simple, and it begins with water

  the water my mother bathed me in was crab water (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers and the children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)

like a spell, like a spell !

when i close my eyes i am wading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearing where bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees

As I mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously aware of only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], Em Dial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray [see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all of whom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection is incredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19^TH AMENDMENT & MY MAMA”:

The third of an almost anything
is a gorge always looking to be
until the body is filled with more fibroids
than possibilities

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Em Dial

Em Dial is a queer, Black, Taiwanese, Japanese, and white writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto. They are the author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024) and an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph. Her work can be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Muzzle Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, the forthcoming Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
As my first book came out last month, I think I am still in the midst of that change. I have been trying to soak in this moment, but I also feel so distant from some of the poems in this collection, that part of me is glad to have it out in the world so that I can focus on what is next. I'm sure that in a few months I will have had the time to process what it means to have this debut living out in the world, apart from me. I imagine the process is going to teach me a lot about trust and letting go.

I'm currently working on a couple of projects that centre nostalgia and chronic illness. I'm finding that through those topics, I'm allowing myself to zero in on the minutiae of day-to-day life, rather than the sweeping glances that are more prevalent in In the Key of Decay. I'm also playing around with form in new ways, especially longer-form works and prose poems.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
In the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years of university, I was listless and depressed and confused, in a very 19-year-old kind of way. Through a series of aimless clicks on YouTube, I ended up watching dozens of spoken word videos, and was captivated for weeks. I wrote two poems of my own, and used them to audition for my university's spoken word collective that fall. I still do not fully understand how I ended up there, as I was not reading much besides my science textbooks at that age, but I think I just needed a way to get to know myself and contextualize my queerness and multiracialness in a world that was increasingly feeling very scary and overwhelming.
 
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'm learning that research and notes are kind of my way-finding tools towards creation. I'll do a deep dive and once I hit upon an idea that tickles something in me, I'll write a quick skeleton of a piece, then get back to reading. Every once in a while, I'll find something that really sparks a complete concept, and a poem looking almost fully fledged will come out. That is quite a rare experience, though.

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?
My first collection was an amalgamation of years of writing individual poems, that were then arranged into a shape that made sense, and from there I filled in the gaps. Now that I am working on more intentionally shaped projects, I am finding that I set out with a vague understanding of what the book might consist of, and then let the research process guide the process from there.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
For the many years when, for me, poetry was synonymous with poetry slams, writing and public readings were inseparable. Now that I have had some time away from the world of spoken word, I think I've grown distant from my desire to entertain an audience and do not enjoy reading my work as much as I used to. That separation has been helpful for my work, as I used to write poems with the goal of getting a 10 from a judge, but now that I've had time to develop a craft and practice that feel authentic to me, I'd love to build that entertainment muscle back up again.
 
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?
Always! A mentor I worked with, Aisha Sasha John, once described my work as phenomenological. I think I am always trying to construct an understanding of something, most often that something being myself and my place in the world. Currently, more specifically, I've been trying to understand where my ideas of masculinity were formed, what kind of character my illness has when separated from myself, and why I feel such a stomach-churning obligation to American imaginings of suburbia.

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?
This might be a controversial opinion, but I think writers, poets especially, are too often given a mystic or sage or benevolent slant. I see writing as a tool, one that can move us towards revolution and liberation, but one that can just as easily be used to placate the masses or to justify and reinforce violent ideas. Personally, I feel the role of a writer like myself is to draw lines between different forces that influence our world and imagine new ways that we can exist with more safety and abundance. However, I don't think that is the role of all writers, and I think it feels even more like a mantle that I want to take on, because I know that there are writers in the world who may feel the opposite way that I do, penning odes to the war machine as we speak.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I mostly love working with editors! It is absolutely critical for me to have the eyes of others on my work. I've been very lucky to have almost exclusively positive experiences with editors who I built trusting, mutually respectful relationships with. My debut couldn't have been what it is without the eyes of Summer Farah and Jim Johnstone.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You hear it a lot being from California, but it originally comes from a Hawaiian saying: Never turn your back on the ocean.

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 haven't been able to sustain any sort of writing routine over the past couple of years while trying to work in the field of urban agriculture. Luckily, in the fall, I am headed to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, where I will be forced into a more regular practice of writing. I'm hoping to get into a more regular practice of morning pages in the next couple of months. Currently, my days begin with rushing to walk my dog before needing to leave for the office.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I have a list of 15 or so favorite poems that I return to when I'm stuck, and try to understand what it is that I like so much about them. If returning to the familiar doesn't help, I'll usually try to read a chapter of a novel or an essay in a collection to shake me out of my poetry brain for a moment while still stirring up images that could potentially be repurposed into something.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Salty sludgy wetlands, Tide laundry detergent, brownies in the oven, the plastic smell of a VHS box, Meyer lemons, and my partner's face moisturizer.

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?
I think I draw inspiration from a lot of corners of my life, but a lot of my work to date has drawn from music and film. Having studied biology and ecology, scientific language and theories often find their way into my poems as well. In the Key of Decay, for example, situates the speaker as constructed by the false sciences of eugenics and race and then acts to dismantle them.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
With much effort, I've limited myself to 10: Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & what I Had On by Khadijah Queen, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soft Science by Franny Choi, Homie by Danez Smith, The Essential June Jordan, Bestiary by K-Ming Chang, Zigzagger by Manuel Muñoz, A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Visit Taiwan, where my dad was born.

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 think if it weren't for writing, I may have stayed in the environmental/food non-profit world for some time. If I were to pick anything besides writing, though, I think it would be something having to do with the ocean. Maybe being a scientific diver.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think that I'm someone whose mind jumps from topic to topic, trying to make meaning out of 1,000 things at once. Writing has offered me a way to construct a sudoku out of the world around me, a frame in which to place the unknowable, confusing parts of the world. It feels like working at cracking a part of the code. I don't know if anything else could have offered that to me.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Pig by sam sax blew me away. It's been a while since I've seen it, but I haven't stopped thinking about Love Lies Bleeding.

19 - What are you currently working on?
The nostalgia and chronic pain collections I mentioned earlier, as well as becoming a student again! For anything else, you'll have to stay tuned!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;