Publication
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Gabe Foreman’s “Complete Encyclopedia…”
Poetry doesn’t have to tell a story, but I must admit, I like it better when it does. It doesn’t have to be a linear story; the story doesn’t need to have characters or an ending. But I always enjoy a poetry collection more if I feel that the poems are somehow knitted together. Gabe…
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Gillian Sze’s “The Anatomy of Clay”
My first feature for the Montreal Review of Books appears in their spring issue, which is on-line now. mRb is a great resource for information about the latest books in English published in Quebec, and it’s distributed throughout Canada. It’s also exciting how much poetry they review, a precious rarity! For my piece, entitled Polaroid…
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Ken Babstock’s “Methodist Hatchet”
When I first moved to Canada, I went on a crusade to introduce myself to as much contemporary Canadian poetry as possible. Considering that I have spent the vast majority of my life less than an hour from the US/Canada border, I was a bit chagrined to realize how few Canadian writers I had ever…
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Joshua Trotter’s “All This Could Be Yours”
I don’t understand why Hollywood insists on marketing movies by comparing them to other movies: “It’s Die Hard meets 2001: A Space Odyssey!” “It’s this year’s Shindler’s List!” Well, I do understand why, but I don’t like the idea that the only way to describe something positively is to compare it to something else that…
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A Blue Ribbon
I’m proud and more than a little bit humbled that my poem, “The Undefended Border,” has won the 2011 Founder’s Prize from RHINO, a Chicago-based poetry journal and collective. I’ve admired their work from afar for a while now; I don’t get to Chicago too often, but their furious poetic activity certainly makes me wish…
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Aurian Haller’s “Song of the Taxidermist”
I’ve been thinking a lot about ekphrasis (the fancy word for a poem responding to a work of art), and it’s led to me wonder whether poetry is as fundamentally a product of input (what a poet sees, hears, reads, and absorbs from the world around them) as of output (the actual writing and revising).…
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In Good Company
The word “inertia” has a negative ring, but I like the idea of remaining at rest unless changed by a external force, which is how my dictionary defines it. The writing life is something like that — doing time at the desk until some mysterious, meaningful force finally shows up to make the work worthwhile.…
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Gail Scott’s “The Obituary”
Buying a 3-month membership to Ancestry.com might be the closest I’ve ever come to going on a bender. There is something about genealogy that I find positively addictive. Each ancestral coupling leads backwards to another and another, like cells dividing. Recovering the path between us and our ancestors is like reading a mystery novel, and…
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D.G. Jones’ Collected Poems
After immigrating from Vermont to Quebec, I undertook the project (one that I now realize will be life-long) of reading Quebec and Montreal writers in an effort to pierce the border between US and Canadian lit, and become more locally literate. D.G. Jones is among those writers who have given me a sense of place…
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Keeping The Web Alive: “Spiral Orb”
Wired Magazine recently published a cover story called The Web Is Dead. The premise is that, over the past few years, we’ve begun to favor “semiclosed platforms” over the “wide-open Web,” that virtual space we were all going to democratize through the magic of HTML. The internet still seems like such a new technology, it’s…
ABBY PAIGE 