There are rats in the house. They gnaw basket-straws, the cardboard edges of things. Their shit, softening in repeated washings, hidden in the fingers of a glove. Grey stains along the baseboard. They track each other, smelling. Eyes dried berries, swiveling. The intelligence of their tails...
She spent the afternoon the same way she had every day that week, digging around the lake after swimming lessons with the dog-eared blue book tucked under her arm. In her bag, a rosemary sprig, a stubby white candle. All week, Fran had been considering the jaw of the squirrel, and now she walked...
i fear the deluge of careerists tapping concrete in oxfords & ballet flats chic folx in Barbour & Burberry coats released from desks to trains or after hours off king west dead ass with pretty young things, all beauties and good vibes only—so kalos kagathos—made flaccid by business manz...
Reviewed by Vange Holtz Schramek Hannah McGregor, A Sentimental Education (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2022), 176 pp., $24.99. The full-scale uptake of social media since the rise of mega platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have led to many critiques of Millennials and Generation...
Read to me in tongues aflame in blame, I asked the past. My prayers burnt to accusations, I cannot get past the past. Killing, not violence if you believe a killer rearranges a body’s time. Rubble of muscle, not soul. All have killed before—so vast the past. I bathed my shadow in a rainstorm...
The frosting on today’s cupcakes is bluish-grey, the colour of blah—the colour of this moment. But the smells of cinnamon buns, movie popcorn, and French fry oil fill the air and remind me of the verb wafts, so I turn away from the dessert shop and try to forget it’s there. I make my way to a...
A flying woman, balances between the cruel heat-drafts of mid July She hovers, between tin-can house-music and picnic-fattened ants whose licorice-backs gleam in the merciless summer heat Her support? The co-conspirator to this rebellion against gravity? Perhaps she’s a childhood friend, a lover...
Reviewed by Leah Bobet Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections (Penguin Random House, 2022), 256 pp., $17 US. If Dead Collections was a space, it would be an archive, or perhaps a human heart: rich, moody, and funny, built with infinite care. This literary supernatural novel takes on the carefully...
Interview by L’Amour Lisik In connection with the annual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place September 28 to October 2, 2022, Plenitude prose editor L’Amour Lisik interviews VFA author Tawahum Bige on their debut collection of poetry, Cut to Fortress. Climate Acts, Land Sings takes place...
