A Q&A with Amanda Merpaw, Plenitude Magazine In connection with the annual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place October 15 to 19, 2025, Plenitude poetry editor Amanda Merpaw interviews Jess Housty. Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is an Indigenous parent, herbalist, and award-winning poet. Their...
for Cathy Ahlers Beloved void. First sound of first stars flung into darkness. You died, and there were eight loads of laundry. A brown mouse poked her head from beneath a white curtain. A con- tractor waved through the kitchen window, then pulled up the rotten deck. The world looked like nothing...
“Okay, like, hear me out. Going to the forest is like the ultimate form of getting in touch with your traditional manhood.” It starts like this, very gently, delicately placed. I am a seed that will soon take root in his mind. Dave is talking to him over a beer, like they do and have done since the...
Under the full blue moon of the sliding year, above a skin of snow, hirsute with trees, and beneath another bluff, the snatch-tangle of saplings in dense thickets over this rolling Wisconsin— Over such slumbering body of land, spunk of forests, bristlejaw of bluffs and hollers, in the shadow of a...
v.f. thompson is just compost in training. She can be found clowning around Thorold, Ontario. Her work can be found in The Hard Times, Last Girls Club, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, the anthologies Monster Lairs, We Can Always Tell,The Crawling Moon, and many other nooks and crannies...
Reviewed by Namitha Rathinappillai Rebecca Salazar, antibody (McClelland & Stewart, 2025), 160 pp., $22.95. Rebecca Salazar’s sophomore poetry collection, antibody, is a telling, a retelling, and an untelling: of the graphic and the pacified; the idiosyncratic and the kindred; and the mundane...
All the girls want to see some beauty tonight. And, if I can’t make it: could you trap the sunset with your desire to hold it in your palm? No, better yet, every evening, stop everything and take me with you filled with purples, pinks and gold. Giving, giving, giving, heaven surely knocking on our...
The room looked like the sky, is what I remembered. It looked like sky or spun candy, even as it smelt like strong bleach and whatever that strong bleach was covering. Maybe I focused on the parts that were like sky to take my mind off what was wrong, or what was inevitable about her ending up in...
a cigarette burns thru the sleeve of an orange Carhartt. night shift, red lights. breastfed men cry with desire & sweat flutters in the moonlight. care is within reach but difficult to hold. another lament marred by toxic fumes. all the creatine a body can pump is...
Reviewed by Mormei Zanke Zachari Logan, Green (Radiant Press, 2024), 166 pp., $25. Say one were to pull Zachari Logan’s Green off a shelf and flip through it; the effect of letting the pages release under one’s thumb like a kineograph would illicit its own sensations even before one read the words...
