Interview by Loch Baillie In this contributor spotlight, poetry editor Loch Baillie talks with Plenitude author Adam Arca about duality, mythology, and liberation movements, and how they converge with Adam’s poetry. Adam is a Filipino migrant rights organizer and writer living on unceded Musqueam...
Reviewed by Drew McEwan Gwen Aube, Missed Connections with Tall Girls (LittlePuss Press, 2026), 104pp., $22.95. I mean this as the highest compliment: Gwen Aube’s 2026 poetry collection Missed Connections with Tall Girls is the most t4t (trans for trans) book I’ve ever read. I mean this not in...
Power to force, I have none. I cannot make things/ humans happen. In the hostel, a tall, narrow window by my pillow opens only at the top. It has no screen. I wake in early morning to the sound of distressed wings— two monarchs fluttering by my face, on the ledge, a metre below the opening. One...
Cruising public bathrooms used to be the only life-threatening activity that we had to worry about. You back your truck into a shaded parking space in the far corner of this well-known cruising spot in a moment of desperation and desire, hoping that someone will park close to you. However, after we...
Mommy J always drove home in the dark. Today my chest lifted & I pretended it didn’t so it might stay longer. It is rare I cry. I love myself but not entirely. Sometimes I’m so vain even I think it’s stupid, if vanity is the right word for what I do in secret. Like googling myself—it never gets...
Reviewed by Anne Perdue Nadja Lubiw-Hazard, The Life of a Creature (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026), 208pp., $21.95. Nadja Lubiw-Hazard is a Toronto-based writer, and author of the novel The Nap-Away Motel and two children’s chapter books. Her latest book, The Life of a Creature, is a bold collection of...
“Talk to dad yet?” Derek asks. His Civic is making the exit out of town along the highway. It’s the middle of the day, which feels a little late to be heading out but I can’t be up before eleven. My body just won’t do it. I glance up from my phone, tuck it into my pocket. “Yeah, of course. I told...
dusty walk up prince street tails flick behind the backs of teddy soft cattle where the egrets feast on the insects crawling from the hoof smears in the earth that holds is held by roots overlapping caressing lovers’ hands whose initials claim the trees crickets chirp forest hums orange light peeps...
Apple blossoms falling like snow. I will not just go to work and die, I’ll have a beautiful life, I promise. I heard you were somewhere. It’s never as bad as it seems; Worse or better. Hotel bathrooms, a fire in the distance. Another generation delirious and disenchanted. The world has always been...
Neurodivergent, queer, and living with chronic illness/disability, Ares J. Benoit (they/any) lives in Calgary / Mohkίnstsis / Kootsisáw with their family, but inside they still feel like a young forest demon discovering poetry for the first time. Micro memoir at Five Minutes Lit; poetry...
