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 Leah Bobet Jeff Miller, Temporary Palaces (House of Anansi, 2026), 320 pp., $26.99. Temporary Palaces takes an intriguing twist on the CanLit formula: two thirtysomething artists reunite to excavate the broken promises and might-have-beens of the place that made them. Except Miller’s...
I’ve seen you around & that means everything bellies swollen with our histories and appetites. I am eating the world with you inside it. Nation Makes is a trans poet and neuroscientist living in Montréal / Tiohtià:ke. Their work examines how the brain and body conspire to create...
Frank is concerned that the drugs I have to take to induce lactation will make me want to kill myself again, but on the warm June afternoon when I fill the domperidone prescription at Pharmasave, I find it hard to imagine. I keep telling people I don’t eat at McDonald’s anymore but we thought this...
for Sarah We begin at the wicker lounge chair, B’s first big tooth cutting, but grin goofy she walks me to the kitchen & back, steps unsteady round & round her dimpled knuckles squeeze my finger while you drink the care I brought: a medium Chai latte. On Fridays, we start water for tea...
Reviewed by Paul Leonard Jean-Christophe Réhel, All Kidding Aside, trans. Neil Smith (Baraka Books, 2025), 306 pp., $24.95. Jean-Christophe Réhel is a young Québecois writer, known for his collections of poetry, his novels, his television scripts, and his columns (both poems and prose) in the...
[FIRST SCENE – SUMMONING] The livestream focuses on four hot gays, the Hex Boys, standing on a cliff overlooking the roiling sea: 1. Ciaran St. Clair The charismatic one; cropped hair, dark skin, tapered jaw; leather jacket with pockets hiding his hands, each finger sporting one or two silver rings...
the sky was a surprise today each time I considered it (1) an army of puffballs marching across a river, (2) cotton ringlets sprung open in the currents of a lagoon, (3) the bruised eye socket of a storm swirling its empty threats the sun winking still behind the hill each of my best dogs let...
Keep above the waterline of breath. The level rises, recedes, the gravitational pull of it, a border contouring the bones of the face, soft chambers of the throat. Fluids have their own willfulness too holy to constrain. We say that there’s a gurgle in the chambers of the heart, or a murmur. The...
Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher Matthew J. Trafford, Runs in the Blood (Arsenal Pulp, 2025), 184 pp., $21.95. An older brother goes viral after murdering a dog. A stepfather’s homophobia rubs off on his gay stepson. A butch lesbian feels out of place at the princess party she brought her...
