Reviewed by Annick MacAskill Joelle Barron’s poetry collection Ritual Lights is an impressive and engaging debut that centres experiences of sexual assault, loss, love, and parenthood in a lyric narrative sequence. The book opens with a series of poems that explore sexual violence and family...
Sugar le Fae —for Keith Maillard Backing under the shower’s hot spittle, a metal knuckle knocks and settles on the bathtub floor. A loonie? Must’ve swam up my pajama pants and stuck to my butt. What booty to excavate from one’s own bathtub, stamped with a bust of the queen mum! What strange...
Mónica Gomery Baby, I went to seminary for theology. They taught me every Thou is a funnel for the big bright You. They taught me God’s erotics would come to me in dreams. Put your queer shoulder to the wheel they said and push your palm into the centre of the earth, love dissolves us into people...
Holly C. Lam She named the dog Whisky so they wouldn’t become alcoholics. She adopted him six months after she finally boxed the clothes and toys and jammed them into the crawlspace. She got the dog for Boyd, to give him a routine. But Boyd wouldn’t walk the dog, wouldn’t feed the dog, wouldn’t...
Mary Chen A soft tapping at my door is enough to wake me tonight, because it is raining and so I have been having bad dreams again. I think it is my night-owl landlord, finally come to inspect the leak in the living room, but when I unlatch the lock and ease it open, I come facetoface with my...
Evelyn Deshane “Are you a virgin?” Emily was flummoxed. Sure, she was in her doctor’s office, and Dr. Rebecca Rosenberg had asked invasive questions right off the bat in the past, but this was still a bit too much. Semantically, at least. Because Emily Flowers, twenty-four, a...
