Today my mother sent me a framed picture of her heart,ladybug stickers in each corner. A chest preparing for new growth. I’m not sorry anymore that she doesn’t like her life. My poemsare dispirited by her, thick mentions of roadtrips, and landscapesand pissing into Lay’s Stax canisters while stuck...
Reviewed by Amy LeBlanc Jillian Christmas, The Gospel of Breaking (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), 80 pp., $14.95. The opening line of Jillian Christmas’ new collection The Gospel of Breaking reads: “tell me what is a body.” This line can be read a few ways—I read it as a question or a plea. The next...
1. They Say Fish Don’t Feel Pain As a new intake, I’m ushered through a maze of clinical rooms, a noisy lunchroom and a bustling gym. Joanne, the program coordinator, shepherds me, waiting as I shuffle with my cane and pelvic brace. We end at a darkened room set apart from the rest of the clinic...
There was no book on how to girl. I read all the books about animals at the library. When my mother gave me a book on puberty, I drew penises. I became track suits, jean jackets, short hair. My bones grew. In the city, I swirled caught without ponds, between asphalt and decay. My friends were boys...
Reviewed by Noah Cain Annick MacAskill, Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020), 96 pp., $21.95. Annick MacAskill’s second poetry collection, Murmurations, explores what it means to live inside a body. Driven by hunger, thirst and love, MacAskill captures powerfully instinctual feelings of longing and...
I know you will make your own way in the world.The way you favour linen and leather, and walk like a boy.Your teeth are like pomegranate seeds, sucked clean.Your motorcycle helmet unleashes copper strands.You do exist. The way you bathed me in mud, adding champagne and orchids.I flogged you with...
Marjan Every year, for two weeks in mid-May, the city is struck by cherry blossom fever. In April, the city waits on the edge of spring, which should be soft like rabbit ears or tulips. More often, spring in the city is sharp, the mornings still mean and frostbitten, the grey dusks prickling with...
There are tiny, quick spiders that live in my curtains. Sometimes they die, shrivelling in silk folds. I killed one once in a moment of fear, interrupting a key sequence of events, like the man who rescued a baby songbird that fell from a nest onto Queen Street, hand fed her mealworms and suet for...
Reviewed by Jane Shi Kimiko Tobimatsu, illustrated by Keet Geniza, Kimiko Does Cancer (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), 96 pp., $19.95. Kimiko Does Cancer, a graphic medicine memoir written by Kimiko Tobimatsu and illustrated by Keet Geniza, is a tender offering that critiques mainstream breast cancer...
