In January I moved into a basement suite in Burnaby. The windows looked out into holes in the ground that were covered by planter boxes along the east wall and a newly built deck along the back. No one lived in the house above, but every weekend at 5 AM the gardener would start up a weed wacker...
i’m from here, drifted in from there, waterlogged, kelped, the sway of the sea still in my knees, where my motion sickness pulls from. like Bà Ngọai, i’m walking as i’m balancing a fishbowl upon my neck, my eyes convexed behind an unseeing lens as clouded as her mung bean yellow cataracts. i miss...
We are excited to announce that Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin has joined the Plenitude team as our second Associate Poetry Editor! Rhiannon will work alongside David Ishaya Osu to discover and publish exciting new poetry from queer and trans writers around the world. Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin (she/her) is a...
Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic Kate Cayley, Householders (Biblioasis, 2021), 235 pp., $22.95. An exceptional volume of stories, Householders warrants applause—and readers, of course. Following How You Were Born (2014), Toronto’s Kate Cayley showcases virtuosic writing and captivating settings...
terra nullius: the inverted disposition of thingsin ordinary flux, logging roads and peri-urbanlawn ornaments replicated on the clouds’ nuclearpetals, I watch the patterns on her dress orbit myeyes, my face, my mouth, overlap with auxiliary species of our scape, a cosmic bodice, feminised and...
I. SUMMER My mother was a gardener. She saw something in nature—in dirt and bugs and effervescent flies—that I never have. Under light skies and bright weather, she’d kneel for hours in our mediocre garden, weeding and watering or whatever it is that gardeners do. I am now doing the same in my...
She lives in one place and one place only: the entrance to a bakery where she has conjured a swirling rainbow display of cupcakes she pictures herself at the counter her voice sweetens an octave for “two please” wheremid she conjures in the cashier’s fingers that plant the sticker on the box the...
Reviewed by Lucian Childs William di Canzio, Alec (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 352 pp., $27.00 US. I’m a sucker for gay love stories. They’re a sensuous, sugary hit of pure emotion. William di Canzio’s Alec is not without problems—like its source material, E. M. Forster’s posthumously...
Your chef will be the first to saynot a muster of hair should remainas he timbers a fire, wide hands barb your fattened flesh. Thigh all manner of birds; you’re as light as a featherthick as a board. Resentful caretakersbreak their deer, unlacelegs, loosen fleshcleanly from each side of bone...
