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...
Latest Stories
Mothers, Lovers, Questers, and Rule-Breakers: A Review of Kate Cayley’s Householders
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...
Selia
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...
Growing Bodies
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...
Wheremaid
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...
Tales of our Forefathers: A Review of William di Canzio’s Alec
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...
Lexicological Etiquette for Taking a Knife to Other Creatures
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...
The Descent: Psychosis, Sister Language, and the Sufi Path to Nihilo
“Fragmentary,” “broken” (Crazy from Swedish Krasa: to CRUSH), and a medley of narratives insisting on disconnect, either from the body, from the self, from language, or whatever apparatus needed to withhold the linear. I say it’s the opposite. If you’ve never been through it, you’re thinking of it...
Inherited Thumbnail
The major sin is the sin of being born. —Samuel Beckett Hominid-handled bovine bone hammered Kindred skull. No dragging knuckles stopped Him looting dark markets, the self helped To fat figs, muted chops of choice tapir. Early man made primal maul, hammered Raft and drifted. Shrooming troglodyte...
