the full issue

Table of Contents
Fiction
David Hancock
3
New Jersey
Andrea Grassi
12
Air Show
Patrick Roesle
18
How You Sleep at Night
Poetry
Rich Ives
32
A Large Seed from the Old Forest
Bardia Sinaee
33
Etobicoke
Marcus McCann
34
Cover Letter
Sandra Lloyd
35
Inclined to Moon
Peter Norman
36
Two Poems
Ben Ladouceur
39
Three Poems
Jessica Comola
42
Two Poems
Souvankham Thammavongsa
46
I Remember
Rodney Wilhite
51
Theft
Finn Harvor
52
nHI-lizm
Robin Richardson
55
Somewhere between Blackbeard and Calico Jack
Liz Howard
56
The World Is Everything that Is the Case
Daniel Scott Tysdal
62
Poem, Phone, Farm:
An Antithetical Multiform Influx (Part II)
Review
Phoebe Wang
80
“Restive Places at the End of Time”:
A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Probably Inevitable
Kevin Kvas
85
“A Lean, Mean Read, or Therefore Just Average?”:
A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Probably Inevitable
Interview
E Martin Nolan
92
“What a Poem Can Do”:
An Interview with Matthew Tierney and Mathew Henderson
119
Notes on Contributors
DAVID HANCOCK
NEW JERSEY
Nanny Six loved raw beef. Liked how it felt at the back of her throat. Some rotavirus in the blood
puffed her vocal cords. Made her sound like a troll.
Nanny Four tried raw beef once but it made her puke. Ate it at one of my parents’ fancy
dinner parties. Raw egg yolk on top. Capers. Fancy crackers. She’d gone out to the living room to
scavenge food. Mother locked us in the rumpus room with some board games and pretzel sticks. We
emerged when the coast was clear and made a beeline for the fridge.
Nanny Three used to give my old man blow jobs in the boathouse.
Nanny Four looked out for us when the adults disappeared.
Nanny Six was from New Jersey. Party girl. Got up to some crazy shit on the weekends.
Dated a senator’s son. But that was years later. After our downfall.
Nanny Four watched Wheel of Fortune in my parents’ bedroom when they were in Europe.
She took off all her clothes and dabbed Mother’s homeopathic lotions on her varicose veins.
Nanny Two died in a skiing accident in Colorado.
Nanny One let us watch The Brady Bunch and The Flintstones back-to-back. She bought us
sticker books with her own money.
Nanny Two said she loved us more than life itself.
Wheel of Fortune fed us sweet, sugary breakfast cereal.
Nanny Seven let me sip her beer.
Nanny Five let me puff on her clove cigarettes.
Nanny Seven was fourteen. Captain Crunch between her braces. She smiled at me and my
heart broke.
Nanny Two had a dark history. You could see it on her face. My old man said he found her
in the back of a dry cleaner. Digging through a dumpster. Searching for chemicals.
Blow Jobs was ex-military.
Wheel of Fortune was working off a debt she refused to talk about.
Nanny Five had unusual ticks. Wore men’s underwear. Put baby powder in her hair. Found
her going through my old man’s laundry once. Sniffing his dirty socks.
Braces was a hypochondriac. Convinced I had rickets. Took me to the free clinic in her
neighborhood. Three-hour bus ride. Some homeless guy called me “Marshmallow.”
Wheel of Fortune got drunk and engaged in crazy, inappropriate behavior. Filled the wading
pool with milk and made me bathe in it.
New Jersey once said, while giving me a bath, “Your testes look like walnuts.”
Dumpster hung a cracked mirror on the wall next to my bed. Said it was to ward off my
perfection.
Wheel of Fortune lived at a Motel 6 with her boyfriend and his mother. She carried around
hundreds of those tiny motel shampoos in her purse.
Braces used to spend hours drying me off after a bath. So much that my skin became chafed.
She said that in order to avoid the impending infestation, I needed to keep myself squeaky clean.
Blow Jobs covered me in glitter and put lipstick on my mouth. She insisted that I learn
French out of an old cookbook Mother kept under the sink. She said, dyeing my hair in the kitchen
sink, “You never know. You might need to sell your body someday.”
Sticker Books claimed she could hear secret, underground generators hum.
New Jersey accused me of having no empathy. “You’re like a human tape recorder,” she
said, “but with no soul.”
Blow Jobs staggered into my bedroom one night, drunk and sporting a black eye. She kissed
me on the forehead and asked me, “Am I still your girlfriend?”
Dumpster smelled like death. Ammonia and wet dog. Her fingers were stained blue.
Dirty Socks had three kids. She used to bring them over on the weekend. One of her kids
was a shitter. He’d drop trou’ in the living room and crap right on the shag.
Blow Jobs blew her brains out with a shotgun. “Like a dude might,” my old man said.
“Damn shame to ruin such a perfect complexion.”
New Jersey wore an ankle bracelet. So we could track her if she left the property. She was
sixteen when we leased her. On the fourth of July we sat under a blanket and listened to the radio.
Canadian station. French. She said it was an erratic jet stream that moved the signal so far south.
Dirty Socks was a partial amnesiac. You could see the vacancy in her eyes. Sitting by the
edge of the pool. Looking at her own reflection. Trying to get a glimpse into her own past. We
didn’t know who she was exactly.
New Jersey had unsettling friends. Showed up in the middle of the night in a Hummer.
Maybe an ex-husband. Or her pimp. Mother bought drugs from him. The three of them partied in
the hot tub.
Dumpster said she was searching for something unreal. She’d get up in the middle of the
night, put on her coat, and walk down to that abandoned strip mall. She just walked back and forth
in front of the boarded up shops. In the morning, we’d find her asleep in the garage. Inexplicable
bite marks on her arms and legs.
Blow Jobs was my first love. I tried to look in her window when she was dressing, but my
old man caught me. He said it was an impossible romance, and I should focus on girls my own age.
Dirty Socks liked to kill field mice. She’d put out those sticky traps with the peanut crumbs
on them. Attractant. Sat there in the dark. Waiting. When she caught one, she just watched it suffer.
Trying to escape the glue and crawl back to its family. Tearing off its fur. Stretching its legs like
rubber bands.
Wheel of Fortune found my shoebox. It was filled with dirty socks.
Braces took us to Montana. Due to kidnapping concerns. My old man had hundreds of acres
out there. Only we were stuck inside a cabin with a couple of private-security men. Playing with
sticker books.
New Jersey drove with us in the Jeep. Windows blackened. Sound of bombs in the distance.
She let me put my head on her lap when I was scared.
Wheel of Fortune cried a lot. My old man couldn’t stand it. He said, “They will tell you they
hurt inside, but don’t fall for it. No matter what they tell you. You have to be strong.”
Dumpster came with a warranty. My old man showed it to me once. We drove for days into
corn country. Small town. Bank. He had a secret safety deposit box there. “Out of the public sight,”
he said. Assumed name. “Keep the IRS off my ass.” He showed me her papers. In an old leather
dossier.
New Jersey was deeded to me when I was twelve. I told her I wanted waffles for breakfast.
“But I’m running out of battery power,” she said.
Blow Jobs taught me to communicate by blinking my eyes.
Dirty Socks killed a man. In the garage. I just remember the sirens. Mother said the man was
there to do bad things to us. My old man was thankful he paid extra for the special-ops training.
Braces had greasy hair. I imagine there’s still a stain on the wall next to her bed. Looked like
a skull.
Blow Jobs said she yearned for one moment in life where the fragments came together and
made sense.
Wheel of Fortune came to us through the national lottery. It was the system they used back
then. To assign a girl to a family.
Dumpster taught me sexual positions using a G.I. Joe and a Barbie doll.
Nanny Eight had unpleasant and dark memories of her father. She wrote them down in a
journal that she kept under her pillow.
Dumpster still crawls around inside my head at night.
New Jersey hated silence. She was constantly humming a tune. Or the radio was on.
Dirty Socks said I could look at her pussy if I wanted. She sat on the couch in the unfinished
basement and spread her legs on the ottoman.
Braces left me when I turned seven.
Blow Jobs grew tired with age.
Dumpster got angry with me for not believing in God. “Who’s going to give you the glue?”
she asked.
New Jersey watched the decline of my family from afar.
Sticker Books recognized Mother’s mental instability right away.
Wheel of Fortune wore funky high heels. During the downfall, the two of us fled to the city.
Braces saw my old man’s car explode. She wiped blood splatter from my face. She pulled
gravel and safety glass fragments out of my arm with a tweezer.
Blow Jobs was dragged away by a neighborhood patrol. They had started cropping up all
over. We were walking the dog. They spotted her and dragged her into their van. I hid in the bushes.
Dumpster and I traveled to New Jersey incognito.
Wheel of Fortune said that when she was a little girl the colours were more intense.
Dumpster kept a folder of places she wanted to visit.
Dirty Socks and I took baths together until I was sixteen. She washed my back with a
sponge. She kissed my deformities. “Does it still hurt?” she asked.
Sticker Books liked to take us to Fairy Land. That was a small, local amusement park out on
the outskirts of town. There was a huge cement whale at the entrance. You walked through its
mouth to get in. The ticket booth was inside the throat.
Braces said her grocery lists were an underappreciated form of poetry.
Wheel of Fortune liked to flirt with the guy who ran the farm stand.
Dirty Socks loaded me into a station wagon. She told me we were leaving the city. We were
losing the war. None of the other grown-ups wanted to admit it, but we would be invaded by the
end of the week.
New Jersey lived with me for ten days in a storage unit.
Wheel of Fortune once told me that voles were monogamous.
Sticker Books took us trick-or-treating. She dressed my sister up like a princess. I was a troll.
Dirty Socks looked out the bus window and asked me, “Where have all the people gone?”
New Jersey said that I was a special, because I wasn’t seduced by the big picture.
Nanny Eight made me wear a pair of headphones and a sensory vest. Mother thought I was
autistic, but really I was just angry.
Blow Jobs took us to Fairy Land after it had closed. We broke in with her boyfriend. They
were drinking vodka out of a thermos. The boyfriend cut the chain-link fence and we crawled in.
The buildings were all broken-down.
Wheel of Fortune climbed to the top of one of the water towers and threatened to jump off.
She said my old man had made her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion.
Sticker Books waltzed into my life too late to save me from myself.
Nanny Nine was Iranian. She had an intensity to her eyes that scared me.
Headphones took me to the movies to see a Disney cartoon about a family of vampires
living in modern-day Los Angeles. Before the film started there was a newsreel about our troops.
The narrator said we were winning the war, but I knew this was a lie.
Dirty Socks took me to the town square one morning. She said she had a surprise for me.
An enemy soldier had been captured and was going to be hanged.
Dumpster had a big binder filled with art projects to entertain us on rainy days. She was
young and optimistic. Mother used to get angry with her, because she let us play with Lego on the
dining room table.
New Jersey predicted that I would never make sense of these fragments.
Wheel of Fortune made a maze in the garage with sheets and lawn furniture and ran the dog
through there.
New Jersey and I held a backyard carnival to raise money for muscular dystrophy but
nobody came.
Iranian held poetry Wednesday, where we had to turn ordinary events into haiku.
Blow Jobs taught me how to build a bomb out of bleach, fertilizer, and marbles. For my
ninth birthday, she gave me a book with pictures of edible mushrooms. She said, “The time will
come when you’ll need a new set of skills.”
Dumpster liked to play capture the flag. Mother was convinced it was thinly disguised
military training. Mother said, “And spin the bottle is really interrogation. So please don’t tell her
anything.”
Iranian said, “The days ahead are wicked.”
Headphones tried to keep the darkness at bay by giving us themed birthday parties long after
we were too old to care.
Dirty Socks had a storage unit filled with furniture and crystal.
Braces made us play a game called “grave robber.” We’d go into the cemetery and dig up a
fake coffin, usually an old Partridge Family lunch box she’d buried. Filled with pictures cut out of
Playboy as a prize.
Braces believed God was random in His blessings.
New Jersey once let me touch her nipple through her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I tried
to stick my hand up there, but she slapped me. “That’s enough for now,” she said.
Headphones came into my bedroom one night and climbed in beside me. She said,
“Somebody is going to have to teach you. It might as well be me.”
Braces told me to remember her in code. “So that the bastards can never take me away from
you,” she said.
Iranian took me into the woods. We were carrying shovels. She made me dig beneath an oak
tree. We found a suitcase. Inside was a dead dog. The dog was wrapped in a plastic garbage bag and
duct tape. “Early genetics experiments,” she said. There was money in there too. Old money. The
faces on the bills were the faces we saw in history books.
Dirty Socks homeschooled me. Mother didn’t trust the teacher’s union. But then my old
man realized the only thing I was learning was housekeeping and so he enrolled me in public middle
school.
Braces showed me the mass grave behind the courthouse. She showed me Mother’s corpse
and let me hold her cold, dead hand for a few seconds. Then the man in the iron mask tossed lime
on her face.
New Jersey visited me when I was sent to live in the special dormitory for orphans.
Iranian said my parents were killed, because they refused to embrace the downfall. “They
couldn’t understand the shifting layers,” she said.
Headphones shot my earth science teacher with an old, rusty revolver. He had been
hoarding chemicals and textbooks.
Braces called the downfall “stasis.” I didn’t know what she meant until my old man sat on
the edge of my bed, holding the Crock-Pot, and wept. He was so hungry he’d slow-cooked my
guinea pig. But he couldn’t figure out if he should use low or high heat. “Six or eight hours?” he
asked. “Curry powder or sage?”
Iranian made sure I got placed in one of the decent work farms. She said that the smart ones
were culled and I could learn a skill that would keep me alive.
New Jersey was the one who told me my little sister had disappeared. “She’s got smooth
skin,” she said. “Probably end up working in one of the sex caravans.”
Sticker Books was accused of being a collaborator. She got strung up outside the public
library for everyone to see. They made me poke her with a stick.
New Jersey said she didn’t feel much pain anymore.
Headphones tried to get me a job at her brother’s Dairy Queen, but he said he already had
his quota of retards.
Sticker Books taught me how to clean weapons. First you break them down into their
components. I had tiny fingers and could handle the small parts without dropping them.
Headphones hooked up with the football coach. He’d been a sleeper agent, working with the
other side. He’s the one who gave them the plans to our defense systems.
Iranian lived in the temple. At least they called it a temple. None of us could figure out
exactly what it was. They seemed to pray there. They got down on their knees when the bell rang.
Wheel of Fortune said that I could try to cling to the past, but that it was impossible to go
back in time.
Dirty Socks said that there was something living in our walls that made her head fuzzy.
Braces taught me how to disconnect from pain.
Sticker Books visited me in the dormitory. It was set up in the old high school gymnasium.
There were mattresses on the floor and tents set up in the locker room. Couples went inside the
tents for conjugal visits. The guards charged by the minute.
Blow Jobs took me on long walks through the city. She was afraid of cracks in the cement.
She put her ear up against graffiti, like it could speak to her.
Braces had a disabled son who was making a set of chain mail out of buttons and twisty ties.
He needed to keep his hands busy so he wouldn’t self-satisfy.
Iranian said cleaning weapons was just a short-term gig for me. She said my fingers were
small now, but pretty soon my knuckles would grow large from malnutrition and fractures. Then
they would have no use for me.
Dirty Socks took her family on a vacation to Florida. They went to Disney World, but
couldn’t afford to stay on-site. So they rented a room at a cheap motel two hours away.
New Jersey carried around a jar of sand and saltwater. She said all nannies were attracted to
the ocean.
Sticker Books sat with me by the fire and told me stories about her eccentric father.
Blow Jobs said she welcomed the extinction of humanity.
Braces said every sentence is a code for something else.
Sticker Books was treated like family. For her birthday, we took her to eat lobster at a
seafood restaurant. This was back when you could get a whole bowlful of steamed clams for two
dollars. Salty. Buttery. She helped me crack my lobster. Dipped the red meat into the butter and put
it in my mouth. I had bad diarrhea afterward. She held me all night. My stomach hurt so bad. I ran
an intense fever. They thought I was going to die. My brain swelled up. I lost my intelligence. “Hush
now,” she said. “You can’t die on me. You’re all I have.”
Dumpster smuggled food into the dormitory. Some extra mac and cheese. A few hot dogs.
New Jersey helped my father stuff the pillowcases with valuables.
Braces got married to a famous movie star. I was picking up trash on the side of the road
and this big limo stopped and she stepped out. She kissed me on the forehead and said, “I knew
you’d find a way to survive.”
Blow Jobs was let go, because my old man thought she’d stolen his Lou Gehrig autographed
baseball. It was in mint condition. It turned out the dog got to it. Chewed it into a pulpy mass.
Braces was in a panic one day. For some reason she needed to find a mirror. “I need it for
signaling,” she said.
Dirty Socks had a brother with wooden legs. He fought in the war and got his legs blown off
stepping on a land mine. The family couldn’t afford fancy prosthetics. Her brother carved the left
leg into a cribbage board. On the right was a picture of a Harley.
Iranian strapped Mother to a chair and pulled the veneers off her teeth with a pair of needlenose pliers. When she was done, Mother looked like a vampire.
Braces claimed revolution was hidden in scraps of memory.
Headphones told me to grow some balls. “Your family grew out of favour,” she said. “So
what? You need to move on.”
New Jersey made me wash her van on Sundays. She said I needed to work off my shame.
Wheel of Fortune said that people want life to lead chronologically from one moment to the
next, but that it rarely does.
Sticker Books told me to be careful. “The haunting will be subtle,” she said. “Objects and
people will become intermingled.”
Wheel of Fortune left a one-line suicide note for her family. “I’ve paid the electric bill,” it
read.
DAVID HANCOCK has received playwriting OBIE Awards for The Race of The Ark Tattoo and The
Convention of Cartography, both presented by the Foundry Theatre. His other theatrical works include
Deviant Craft, Our Lot (with Kristin Newbom), The Puzzle Locker, The Incubus Archives, and Booth.
Hancock is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship, the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in Theatre, a
Whiting Writers’ Award, and a TCG/NEA Playwriting Residency Fellowship. Hancock’s recent
stories can be found in Permafrost, The Massachusetts Review, Interim, Ping Pong and Amarillo Bay. His
essays on playwriting have appeared in American Theatre, and his co-authored fiction with Spencer
Golub is forthcoming or published in Petrichor Machine, Otis Nebula, Danse Macabre, scissors and spackle,
Pear Noir!, Inscape, Map Literary and Bluestem.
ANDREA GRASSI
AIR SHOW
Four jets shake the skyline. Peijui, VP of Development, watches everyone from his King St. location
run to the south windows to see a barrel roll—part of the annual City Air Show. The 30th floor
windows frame the playful jets soaring above the city. Flowing out of the elevators toward the
growing crowd of spectators is the I.T. department—their heads emerge from the hoods of their
sweaters and they scratch their beards as they watch. The steel bird dips back into sight, leaving a
trail of exhaust lines that powder and sink, dusting the streets below. The glass partition parallel to
Peijui’s office door gives him a view of the great windows, so he thinks there is no need to leave his
office, get in front of his desk or off his chair. Bök, VP Client Services, puts his hands on his head,
hunching and wincing at every corkscrew; “Did you see that, did you see?” he says. Twix,
Copywriter, screams while slapping her hands against the window glass; her heels fall out of her
backless summer shoes. They are little round apricots. The frizz in her hair is endlessly caught in an
auburn ponytail that drapes over her shoulder like an animal stole. Peijui remembers the way it felt
like a sponge when he squeezed it on Wednesday.
What happened with Twix were two instances and an event. The first instance occurred
while watching a grilled panini disappear into folds of waxed paper at an Italian deli on the other
side of King St; the second, at the patisserie two blocks south of King on Front. The Event
happened in the time between the two instances, so Peijui thinks of these instances as the Before
and the After. As he watched Twix watching the show, he wondered why she had chosen him. They
never particularly talked much, never went for coffee like so many of his coworkers often did. She
had talked to Seth, Market Sales, more than him—he even saw them tagged in a Facebook picture
laughing somewhere off-site.
The H.R. department swaggers over from the north side of the 30th. The jets shudder out of
sight above the building, and the growing crowd can see two more in the distance heading toward
them to join formation. Some of Peijui’s coworkers look up—as if the jets will somehow be visible
through the white suspended ceilings—to follow the thunder coming from the heart of the fuselage.
It is loud. Peijui notices how short Twix is compared to the rest of the crowd. She has the frame and
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rubber skin of a thirteen-year-old girl and a face sucked so thin; the only perceptible feature is her
nose. But she makes sure she is right at the front by the window, with one of the best views of the
show.
It was the After, at the patisserie, that Twix admitted she never really “cheered for things,”
and her natural state was settled at a level “too low to react.” He remembers her stirring her coffee
and adding the sugar that comes in large brown crystals—a few grains falling onto the table and her
picking them up with the wet back of her spoon. She talked on and on about her lack of animation
since she was sixteen.
“The way I act …” she said, adjusting herself and putting down her spoon slow like it had its
own specifically designed place on the table. “The way I’ve always acted around men doesn’t mean
anything, really.” After saying this, he remembers her leaning back a little, as if she had just
accomplished something, reached some ledge. He remembers her thin grey hands holding up her
cup, this time simply presenting it. He remembers, from the Event, the way her private posture had
this same kind of showmanship. During the Event, her wiry legs, flexed and suddenly thick with
purpose, constricted around Peijui’s waist like killing snakes. It was true she seemed altogether
lifeless otherwise—no screams or gasps—save for the soft and unwavering beat of her shoes
tapping the wall, the crack of static made by hair pulled from wool, a belt jingling.
The Before was at the Italian deli. Working overtime on publicity for their charity outreach
program, Twix suggested they grab take-out. Peijui remembers feeling a new, slung comfort in her
appearance—he had never really looked at her this closely before. Twix’s thin structure made her, to
Peijui, appear as a kind of statue—the kind you want to touch because it is smooth, not the kind you
stand before to admire. Waiting for their sandwiches, she mentioned that working late took her
mind off of her mother’s sudden death.
They walked back to the empty building, Peijui holding the plastic bags containing two
waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches, Styrofoam cartons of salad, two pops. The elevator ride to the
30th was smooth and quiet at first, with talk about outreach and team building, but Peijui
remembers this was when he was really lost on the white moon between her neck and shoulders.
Her body was more or less a collection of edges, but there, thought Peijui, was a perfectly cradled
curve. He asked her how her mother had died when they got to the 28th floor. He wanted to know
more about her and didn’t know what else to say. Twix, shifting, said quickly, “Heart attack”. Peijui
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could hear Twix’s lungs pumping hard under her thin chest after she said this, and thought perhaps
the force would eventually crack her ribs, the sound like chattering teeth. He could see it, so he
stopped. Then they left the elevator and went into their separate offices to eat and work.
Everything was normal again—quiet—until Peijui decided to go home. Then the Event. He
remembers collecting his things and turning off his office light, noticing the way his grey carpet, grey
walls, and black desk settled into a cooling navy after hours. He made sure he had a red pen and the
day’s newspaper for the subway ride home—he enjoyed tracing the faces in the news photos in red
ink because it turned all the scenes into flat cartoons. He remembers heading toward the elevators,
as he usually left without saying goodbye to anyone, but decided that this time, because he knew
how her mom died, he should probably say goodbye to Twix. He also wanted to see her skin again.
Her smooth moon neck. He turned back and walked to her office door. Expecting to look in and
see her punching away at her computer, he decided to wave quickly from the door and maybe say
something, but she was already waiting for him in the frame.
The jets are back in the window, flipping and vibrant. They head back toward the lake and
the crowd swells because they know the show is about to reach its climax—a triangle formation
maintained through a series of loops and curves executed over the water.
“Here it comes!” says Bök. Gerald, CEO, passes Peijui’s office to dissolve at the front of the
crowd.
“In this case, the nosebleeds are the best seats in the city,” says Gerald. The crowd laughs
and cheers the show on. Twix’s hands spread along the glass, creating wider spaces between her
fingers. Her ponytail falls behind her, jerking back and forth as her head follows the snarling sound.
***
In the affluent suburb of Silo Park, a sixteen-year-old girl was found prisoner in her parents’ attic—
forced to wear a peach blanket over herself at all times. When the blanket was removed, it was
reported that the top of her head was completely bald, hair rubbed off over time. She died in the
hospital shortly after her rescue due to heart failure. Her father was a recorded sex offender, and the
parents were sentenced to life in prison: the “Silo Psychos.” When Peijui first saw Blanket Girl, he
was in the sauna of his dad’s pool house. Sixteen, alone, curious and overwhelmed by the pulsing
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warmth and the soft pine, Peijui rested his hands on the front of his swim trunks. He had a poster of
Linnea Quigley above his bed, so he closed his eyes and thought of that. Her little body, in a metal
bikini. Her blond hair pulled over one shoulder. She was holding a chainsaw, too—such a tiny thing
holding it up with one hand, propped on her hip like it weighed nothing. He pulled his swim trunks
down around his mid-thighs. That is when he noticed her crumbled, tattered pink appearance on the
opposite bench. She slunk down to the floor and began to slowly roll toward his toes. He had heard
of her ghost appearing at neighbourhood birthday parties, garage sales, alleyways, barbecues, but he
never actually believed it. He remembers her silvery hand emerging from beneath the hem and
grabbing his ankle, then his scream and his kick at the mass of peach. Even though he saw the hand,
when he kicked it he just felt a silly light blanket, empty, landing in a humph. Peijui pushed open the
sauna door and continued to wail as he ran back to the main house.
He remembers how cold it felt outside that night, his lungs icy from the screaming and the
running and his sweat lapping up the cold air. Mom was in the kitchen at the glass breakfast table, a
bronze can of cola opened and ticking beside her as she thumbed the stock pages. She looked up
startled and then furious; Peijui stood there scared and crying with his shorts around his ankles and
his shame dangling. He was being punished for his urges, and he swore he would stop. He could.
Could he? He promised.
***
The Event happened, as Peijui remembers, after Twix told him to come into her dark office. She
walked around her desk and stood there with one hand resting on top. Among her things like a tiny
pillar, her skin was so bright against the dark cool of the room. Peijui began to feel the air's volume,
everything heavy and elastic. She looked at Peijui, but also beyond him. She walked close, first
touching his arm and then his mouth, pressing hard. Her strength startled him. He wasn’t sure what
to do, but his body and Twix’s tiny frame led them firm. Barbs of pain pulled through his stomach,
rising into his throat. Could he? He remembers the feeling of her ribcage contracting—the bones
massaging the palms of his hands as she clung to him.
Two days after the Event, as the jets twist and sear—Twix with blush cheeks, screaming
mouth wide, hot breath misty on the window glass—Peijui wonders if she slept that night. He went
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back to his apartment to drink milk at his kitchen table and trace the newspaper in red ink. Every
muscle in his body was soft butter. He finished outlining an entire issue and held it up. Art. He
laughed and laughed at the paper lit by the kitchen light that only he had ever switched on and off.
Did she go home alone, too? Did she think of him or her dead mom or Seth, Market Sales? What
did she think of while she was sharing her editorial ideas in the board meeting the next day? Peijui
wonders now as he watches her shifting back and forth at the window—rosy lips, cheering for the
show.
“One of them is doing a free fall. I don’t remember this part,” yells Bök. The crowd around
the window begins to panic.
“Jesus, he’s crashing,” says Gerald. Black smoke, tail to sky, the frantic sound stirs the life
below, making way for the inevitable boom. Horns beep and sirens fill the ache of air that has no
future but to make a noise that will never dull. In an instant, a black coil of smoke twists up from
the lake and the sky becomes the only quiet place. H.R. covers their open mouths, pulling into the
window. I.T. runs to the nearest offices to watch a live news feed. Peijui gets up to join them, but
any curiosity is turned into white terror when Blanket Girl reappears. She is emerging from the 30th
floor spectators, rolling toward Peijui’s office straight and calm along the carpet. The blanket that
covers her floats slowly along, pulled by nothing. Peijui runs back to his office and shuts his door.
He squats behind his desk but can’t stop watching her through his glass partition, the frail dead form
of a girl beneath a tattered pink blanket. She looks like a joke—God’s own pink tissue—and the
only things that would make her more absurd would be two cutouts for eyes. But Peijui knows she is
real.
Ambulances whine below. Everyone in the office is at their computer now, flashes of the
scene lighting up pale faces in a sobering blue. Bök bites his hands and cries on Twix’s shoulder as
crash footage from a bike messenger’s cell phone loops on the national news. There is doubt in her
being able to prop his weight, like a table picture frame with a back support that is slightly too small,
and you wait for the photo to topple backwards with the slightest movement in the room. But she
holds him. Blanket Girl melts through Peijui’s office window, mounts his desk and squats to place
her hidden face inches from his. He can’t detect any sort of breathing but he knows there is a girl
under there. He has seen her hands below the hem, not thin and frail and cooked tender by death
like you would imagine, but smooth and silvery, like dolphin skin. She throws off her pink cover and
!
!
a clog of fog slips off her shiny body. She is ugly, but her skin shines and catches the fluorescent
overhanging light. Her naked body is twisted and tiny and silver, even her toes. Her face is a house
pet run over by the family station wagon. There is no hair, everything slippery. Her smile shakes as
she reaches out for Peijui’s face and she looks at him with white eyes completely blank. Her hands
are hot, not cold like you would expect from something dead or with death, and she squishes his
cheeks between them.
There is chaos in the touching, a rumbling spider crawling up his arm bone to his brain.
Through Blanket Girl’s grasp, he can hear what the crashed pilot is thinking as his jet sinks deeper
into the lake: Special Forces, one episode of anoxia, his wife’s hair smelling like peeled oranges, his
daughter sliding down her favourite red slide at the park by their house. There is one final thought
the pilot has, and Peijui hears it loud, the desperate question: Am I alive? Despite the definite end of
traveling in one direction gaining force, there is some peace for Peijui. Blanket Girl squeezes harder
now, getting ready for the final crush, and he thinks his last clear thoughts: Linnea Quigley’s white
body in Return of the Living Dead, the light fixture that hangs over his kitchen table that is round and
looks like a lady’s breast, Twix’s strength, the way his mom’s hair always curled sideways at the back.
ANDREA GRASSI used to work as a copywriter in advertising and for magazine until she decided she
wanted to become a research librarian. She is graduate student at University of Toronto’s iSchool.
She also folds shirts and stacks books for money. Ad infinitum, she is moved by three little words:
cup of coffee. You can sometimes read new things by going to agrassi.com or following her tweets
(@andGrassi). Currently, her first manuscript is being read by Claudia, Jack, and Andrew. (Also,
Grassi would like to give a shout-out to Kim at the Staples copy and print center).
!
!
PATRICK ROESLE
HOW YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT
The regularity and assuredness of the nine-to-five workweek was never something to which you had
to resign yourself. On the contrary, you found it agreeable from the beginning. While your buddies
approached their mid-thirties with recalcitrance, bucking back against the quiet uniformity that is the
lot of the white-collar homeowner, you relished the cozy security of it. The last ten years have been,
overall, as smooth and altogether pleasant a ride as the NJ Transit train you ride from Summit to
Penn Station, from Penn Station to Summit, five days a week.
One Tuesday evening, you ride the train home beside another man in another grey suit with
his own iPad in his own lap. He’s playing Fruit Ninja, flawlessly slicing and dicing with a rapid
precision belied by his disinterested expression. You’re reading a news report about the persistence
of worker suicides at the Chinese manufacturing complex where the devices in your laps were likely
assembled.
You read half of it and move on to another story about a frenzied mob in some Middle
Eastern country setting fire to their own buildings and killing each other while blaming America for
inciting them to it. After skimming the first two paragraphs, you lose interest.
You close out of the news feed and browse your apps for a game to play. You’re already
bored with most of them, and suppose it’s time you finally downloaded Angry Birds and saw for
yourself if it's as good as they say.
The network signal could be better; you grumble privately about the download taking so
long. By the time the game is ready to play, the train is pulling into Summit Station.
You disembark, find your cherry red Honda S2000 in the daytime parking lot, and drive five
minutes to the elegant one-storey house you share with your wife.
As you settled into the salaryman’s life, you eased into the role of husband and provider with
few jaunts and bumps. The honeymoon has been over for a while now—that was to be expected—
but you and your wife now share a comfortable, well-lubricated working relationship. You keep the
roof over your heads; she keeps the things beneath that roof well ordered. You keep gas in both
!
cars’ tanks; she runs the errands. You pay for milk and bread; she prepares the meals. You bought
the king-size memory foam mattress you share at night; she makes the bed in the morning.
You’ve been talking lately about having a child. Neither of you sees any reason not to, but
it’s an objective you haven’t pursued with much vigour thus far. It will happen when it happens.
You arrive home, change your clothes, and sit down with your wife to a meal of flank steaks,
cooked apples, and mashed potatoes. She talks about supermarket coupons, tells you all about the
sale at The Gap, and mentions that the new round of seasonal beverages has arrived at Dunkin’
Donuts and Starbucks; your attention drifts. She finally asks you how your day was, and you
grumble about a rebranding campaign mandated by some boneheaded executives, and tell her your
big meeting with the Aetna people is tomorrow afternoon. She assures you it’ll go fine – even
though she really knows nothing about the particulars or what's at stake – and cheerily spoons more
apples onto your plate.
You help her with the dishes, brew a pot of decaf, and then the two of you sit in the living
room and watch TV. The usual cadre of well-lit MSNBC pundits argue about Guantanamo Bay. On
Animal Planet, a documentary about biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest enters the inevitable
denouement focused on endangerment, habitat destruction, loggers, cattle farmers, and implicit
finger-pointing. The Discovery Channel airs a program about telegenic collectors buying valuable
curios from packrats.
It’s a marathon. You and your wife sit through three episodes, yawning.
She gets ready for bed while you catch up on your afterhours business e-mail, finalizing
some final preparatory minutiae for the big meeting. Afterwards, you brush your teeth, strip down to
your briefs, and get into bed.
The TV mounted on the wall opposite the bed is tuned to CNN, which airs a report about
the latest civilian casualties of a drone attack in Afghanistan. The controllers were aiming for
militants, but they hit a school instead.
You sidle up to your wife and kiss the back of her neck. She tells you she’s having her
period.
Another night, then.
Now the silver-scalped anchorman introduces a related story about PTSD and suicide rates
in veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. After a few minutes, you lose interest and tell your
wife goodnight. She’s already asleep. You switch off the TV and set the remote on the nightstand.
!
But for your wife’s slow respiration, all is silent. Your tinnitus—a high-pitched ring, nearly
imperceptible during the day—rises to an irritating prominence.
One too many rock concerts without ear plugs back in your college days. Only a problem
during the rare sleepless night.
Tonight you can’t sleep.
You’re certainly tired enough, too tired to get out of bed and do something else. But you
can’t sleep. You can’t quite relax.
You have no reason to be anxious about tomorrow. You’ve done this plenty of times.
You’re not anxious, not at all. Truly.
But you can’t sleep.
Your ears are ringing.
You roll over on your side. You flip onto your stomach.
You switch to your other side, and then lie on your back.
It’s not that you’re uncomfortable. A mattress costing as much as yours doesn’t permit
discomfort.
Your ears are ringing.
The silence is so absolute, and you’ve been lying and listening to your ears ring for so long
that you imagine a slight change in the pitch.
You squeeze your eyes shut and pull the covers over your head.
Ten minutes later, you sit back up.
Your ears are still ringing.
Even though the dullest ambient noise would muffle it altogether, the ringing seems so
loud—and you’re nearly certain it’s increasing in volume.
The red digits on the alarm clock blink 12:00.
You’re too tired to reset it. It’s not a problem, anyway; your wife reliably wakes up between
5:45 and 5:59 on her own.
You lie back down and take deep, deliberate breaths, trying to empty your mind and ignore
the noise in your ears. You can only manage it for five minutes before sitting back up.
The tone is definitely louder than before.
And there’s something else. You detect a peculiar vibration in the room. The air buzzes. The
bed, the sheets, the pillow all seem to tingle against your skin.
You lie back down and try to ignore it.
!
The last few days have been difficult, more demanding than usual, what with this big
presentation to such an important prospective partner. Maybe they’ve put more of a strain on you
than you thought. Maybe you’ve been concealing your anxiety from yourself. Maybe you’re just
overtired. Maybe it’s an incipient migraine. Maybe you’re coming down with something.
A low hiss accompanies the tone in your ears. Something pricks your eyelids. The TV is on,
but there’s static on the screen—an unfamiliar sight since you had the digital cable installed.
The remote control is on the nightstand where you left it.
It could be your imagination—as much as the rest of it—but you think you feel your body
sinking deeper into the mattress. Your muscles seem unusually heavy and unresponsive.
It’s all in your head. It must be.
But the TV is on, the bed buzzes against your sides, and now a distinct third noise hits your
ears: a crackling, popping whistle, too loud to be your imagination, yet still so faint that you can hear
your wife breathing on the other side of the bed.
You nudge her. She doesn’t respond.
The digital clock reads 88:88. The numbers seem unusually dim. Squinting, you perceive the
digits flickering, cycling randomly through each possible value almost faster than your eye can
detect.
Your muscles tense. Your head feels heavy. The whistle grows louder. You can see your
wife’s chest rise and sink through the sheets, but you can no longer hear her breathing.
The bedroom door opens and it walks in.
The thing must stand a full nine feet tall—it has to stoop to pass through the doorway
without bumping its head. It is humanoid, but definitely not human. The body is too large, too
abominably malformed. Its limbs reach too long in proportion to its body; its digits extend too far in
proportion to its hands and feet. Most appalling is the elongated neck and the giant, asymmetrical
skull bobbing atop it.
From the centre of the ghastly face stare two bulbous eyes, lidless and large as softballs. No
nasal ridge divides them; the creature has no nose to speak of. A pair of thin, leathery lips are fixed
in what might either be a smile or a scowl.
It stands wholly naked, white as antiseptic, totally hairless, skin smooth enough to answer
the flickering television static with an anguilliform sheen. You notice a pair of sagging, nippleless
breasts—but below a protuberant belly hangs a penis and scrotum, necrotic, shriveled to every
appearance of vestigiality.
!
You whisper your wife’s name.
The visitor crosses over the straw flower-toned frieze carpet with an ungainly, slumping gait.
Its arms hang motionless at its sides, while its neck and head undulate rapidly, inconsonant with its
stride. The sight might appear comically ridiculous were the visitor’s unexpected arrival in your
home, in your bedroom, not so stupefyingly awful.
Something scrapes against the ceiling. For the first time you notice the mechanical third arm
emerging from the thing’s left shoulder blade: three kinematic rods composed of a lusterless black
alloy, connected by spherical pivot joints, reaching over and beyond the bobbing head and
terminating in an articulate, two-thumbed claw.
The visitor has not come alone. Hundreds of spiders flood in from the hallway in rapid
waves, spreading out over the walls and ceiling. As the first droves cross the wall above the
headboard, you see that they aren’t arachnids—at least not of any terrestrial variety. They are about
the size of fingernails, armored in iridescent beetle-like carapaces, skittering about on eight spindly
metallic legs three or four inches long. They possess no discernible heads or faces, though
circumferences and undersides bristle with tiny spines. You cannot guess whether they are living
organisms, mechanical impostures, something between the two, or something wholly other.
As the swarm fills the room, the vibrations intensify, penetrating your body to the muscles,
bones, and marrow. The crackling whistle whines louder, becomes intolerable, pushes harder into
your brain.
The visitor arrives at the foot of the bed, and (apparently unable to rotate its neck) pivots to
face you and your wife.
It stands and stares. The eyes are uniformly black; it’s impossible to tell what they might be
looking at.
All you can do is stare back.
For a millisecond all the spiders stop where they are, and a spasm thrills through their whole
mass. The light in the room changes. 88:88 flickers on the alarm clock in cobalt blue digits. The
static commotion on the TV screen takes on a cerulean tint; the green light on the induction charger
sitting on your writing desk goes purple. The visitor’s skin remains a stark white.
At the same instant, you feel a sharp twitch from your wife’s body. She had been lying on
her back—and she still is, but her form now lies straight and unflinchingly, almost unnaturally rigid.
Wait. Where did that come from?
!
You never saw it enter the room, but there it is at the visitor’s side: a five-foot metal console
resembling a dialysis machine, all dials, gauges, and compartments.
The visitor reaches across the bed—its gaunt arms are long enough to reach the headboard
from where it stands—and takes the sheet’s hem in its fingers and draws it back to itself. You and
your wife lie exposed on the mattress.
A few spiders drop down from the ceiling and crawl over her limbs. She doesn’t stir.
The visitor’s mechanical claw produces a small device that whistles like a dentist’s drill, and
lowers it toward your wife’s neck.
You shout, “Hey!” and feel like an idiot—a terrified, ineffectual idiot.
The visitor ignores you. You hear the tool cutting through something. The claw drags it
along with an unerring steadiness, and shortly arrives at the bottom of your wife’s nightgown. The
visitor spreads apart the shorn garment and lays the folds creaselessly at your wife’s sides. She now
lies naked.
You feel your face flush. The least you could do is sit up. But you’re still on your back.
You’re still only watching. But your limbs and head feel so heavy, and the noise …
You shut your eyes. This is a dream. Nothing like this ever happens to anyone. Not in this
world. It’s impossible. It must be a dream.
But the buzzing ring and sickening vibrations persist. You open your eyes again. The visitor
is still there, and you watch it push needles into your wife’s flesh.
Two in her wrists. Two in the temples. One at the base of her neck. Two behind the knees.
One particularly long needle is delicately pressed into her forehead with a bone-piercing pop. To each
needle is attached a transparent, flexible tube running back to the machine at the visitor’s side.
The visitor steps around the machine and extended tubes, and stops beside your wife. One
hand slides under the small of her back. The other moves under her thighs. Her rigid body is lifted
some inches above the mattress while the mechanical limb reaches around and down to insert a hose
into her anus. After setting her back on the bed, the visitor pushes another hose between her thighs
and into her vulva.
You bark in outrage. You threaten the intruder with punishment and violence, demand that
it leave your wife alone and get out of your house immediately. Your protests go unacknowledged.
The machine standing at the visitor’s side grinds and purrs. A radium-green solution pushes
through the tubes in discrete drips and into your wife’s body.
!
Gradually, you’ve managed to rise to a seated position, pressing your shoulders against the
headboard. You know you should be doing something—anything—but what can you do?
You put your pillow over your face, push it against your ears to drown out the horrible
buzzing. It’s no good. You can still feel the air vibrating against your body, your skeleton quaking
against your muscles. The awful ringing pierces the pillow, unhindered, and tunnels into you.
You remove the pillows and a fresh shock leaves you gasping for air. The visitor holds
another tool in its hands, appalling for its mundane familiarity in the grip of something so
unutterably alien.
The tool is an ordinary pair of pliers with black rubber handles, like any sold at Home Depot
or Wal Mart.
Nothing you can do, you tell yourself. You tell yourself because you’re afraid. You know you
can’t fight this. You’d lose, and you’d probably just make things worse.
So far the naked monster and its spiders have been focused exclusively on your wife. If you
attempted to fend them off, that would almost certainly change.
Four arthritic fingers pry your wife’s jaws apart. Her mouth hangs stiffly open. The visitor
situates the pliers’ nose around one of her front teeth, adjusts its grip, and gives a fierce jerk.
One by one, your wife’s teeth are torn out.
Her limbs occasionally twitch, but she does not awaken. Each tooth is discarded with an
unexpected carelessness and carried off by the spiders.
The blood bubbles from your wife’s mouth, dribbles down her chin. Arriving at the upper
molars, the visitor leans in closer, exerts the pliers with more rigor, but its face remains an impassive
mask. It is so close you can smell it—stingingly acrid, but strangely familiar. But you can’t place the
scent.
You wife’s chest heaves. She coughs, chokes on her own blood. The visitor places a broad
hand on her abdomen and pushes sharply upwards. The blood in her throat is forced out, splattering
the visitor’s belly, its arms, and the mattress sheet.
The procedure is momentarily stalled while the visitor places an air hose in your wife’s
mouth to suck up the blood.
After removing the last of your wife’s bottom molars, the visitor sets the pliers aside. From a
compartment in the humming machine, it withdraws a small metal cube and places it on the
nightstand.
!
You can’t look. You don’t want to know. You avert your gaze, turning your head to the side,
and see that the door to the hallway remains wide open. Several minutes have passed since the last
wave of spiders arrived. If you ran for it, would your visitors stop you?
You swing your legs around over the bedside and nearly set them on the floor—but you
glance down and see the floor churning with spiders. What would happen if you stepped on them?
You might well invite the vengeance of the whole toxic swarm. And what if there are more,
hundreds and thousands more in the hallway, waiting and primed to punish an escape attempt?
Placing your feet back on the mattress, you decide to wait a little longer before committing
yourself to any dangerous courses of action.
You look back toward your wife. The cube on the nightstand is actually a hinged box, and
the lid has been opened. The visitor reaches its fingers inside and removes a tooth, indistinguishable
from an ordinary human cuspid, except for its bottom, which tapers down into a serrated screw.
One by one, the thing twists your wife’s new teeth into her lacerated gums.
“What are you doing?” you shout. You demand an explanation of your intruder; what gives
it the right and why did it choose you of all people, you and your undeserving wife?
The thing pauses and turns toward you. It speaks to you in a voice that sounds like jet
engines and rent metal. You can’t understand a word.
Now having screwed in the last of your wife’s replacement molars, the thing withdraws its
bloody fingers, pushes her jaw shut, and stands erect. It slams the box shut, and you hear something
click. A violet effulgence flares inside your wife’s mouth, visible through her cheeks, spilling out
from between her pressed lips. It dims and fades almost immediately. Smoke rises from her mouth
and nostrils; the scent of ozone and cauterized gum tissue fills the room.
You seize the TV remote from the nightstand and hurl it at the intruder.
You miss. It sails over its shoulder and clatters harmlessly against a bare spot on the wall
where the spiders opened their ranks to dodge the incoming missile.
You glance about for a more effective weapon that might be within reach, but freeze when
you see the blade appear in the manipulator’s grip. The visitor places its hands on either side of your
wife’s ribcage. The claw lowers the blade toward her abdomen.
Three incisions in the belly. One horizontal line below the navel. One horizontal line just
above the crotch. A vertical line joining the two.
The flaps are pulled apart—skin, fat, muscle and all—exposing the greasy contents of your
wife’s abdominal cavity.
!
For a severed instant you think back to high school biology, to the day your class dissected
fetal pigs. And you remember the smell you couldn’t place earlier.
Formaldehyde.
Six spiders position themselves at equidistant points along the edge of each flap. All at once,
all twelve bring their legs together and stand upright, pinning the splayed flesh tautly in place.
A new scent strikes your nostrils, hot, wet, and pungent. Not for the first time, a wave of
nausea rips through your body.
No husband should ever know how awful his wife smells on the inside.
And despite yourself, you’re relieved that it’s not happening to you.
You’re not without sympathy, grief, anguish—but your frenzied thoughts continually bend
toward the natural considerations of life, limb, and culpability. What’s worse? Being dissected or
being left alive to explain your wife’s evisceration to the police, the media, your in-laws? What sort
of dating life awaits a widower with a disemboweled spouse?
Now the visitor employs a heavy-looking cone-shaped tool with a pair of handles on either
side and a nozzle or barrel at its posterior apex, holding it over your wife’s incision by both handles
while the claw operates a control panel situated on the top. Multiple laser beams, blue as the digits
on the clockface, flash and scatter from the device’s barrel in an elaborate dance. Smoke rises from
your wife’s viscera. You smell burning meat.
After some moments, the visitor stoops to set its tool on the floor. It reaches into your
wife’s belly and begins the process of removing her intestines, unraveling the spotted coils and
winding them around the mechanical claw like a garden hose being hung on a peg.
Your wife’s eyes are open, pupils rolled back and out of sight. A slow trickle of drool drips
from the side of her mouth. She makes a noise—a tranquilized, palsied “uuunghh.” Her body must
have some idea of what’s happening to it. She must be in shock. What has that machine been
pumping into her?
You must have blacked out. Suddenly your wife’s bowels are gone, and the visitor wields the
laser cutter again, aiming it lower than before.
After finishing and setting down its tool, the visitor’s dripping hands disappear into your
wife’s incised belly and gingerly extract a tumid, pear-shaped lump with flapping ligaments on either
side. What most strikes you is the sight of two puckered globules, glistening white. It isn’t until the
organ disappears into a drawer-like compartment in the standing machine, dropped like a chewed
apple into a garbage can, that you realize it had been your wife’s uterus.
!
Intolerable. You swim away from yourself again in a delirium of terror and wrenching
nausea. You lose awareness of all sensation except for the stink of human viscera and the infernal,
aneurysmic buzzing.
You’re wondering what to tell the 911 operator. And how the hell will you explain this to
your boss when you call out of work?
Christ, no—you can’t call out. You’ve got the meeting with the Aetna people, and you have
to be there, only you can talk them through it, you’ll blow the whole thing if they have to be told
they came out to New York for nothing.
You’ve removed yourself so effectively from the scene that it is several moments before you
realize the visitor has begun placing something into the hollow left by the extracted uterus: a vaguely
pear-shaped pouch composed of a black, fibrous material, firm but evidently pliable. The underside
funnels into a rubbery valve; over the visitor’s fingers droop two lateral fins in which are embedded
a pair of faintly luminous blue polyps.
Once the device is satisfactorily in place, the thing withdraws and the spiders spread over it,
thick as maggots on old meat. Some move across the implant’s surface, coating it with a viscous,
colorless secretion. Others weave paths over, around, and under the implant. From what you can
tell—it’s difficult to see from where you’re lying—they seem to be using their legs and prehensile
bristles to weave the adjacent membranes and vessels into the device’s fibres.
It is a prolonged operation. The minutes screech sickeningly along like hours. The vibrations
are worse than ever. It costs a fair effort to keep your stomach from heaving up dinner, your lower
sphincters from loosening, your voice from screaming and pleading.
The visitor stands motionlessly at the foot of the bed and stares.
Finally the spiders disperse. From another compartment in the console, the visitor pulls a
long, segmented hose, coiled, varying in width from end to end, composed of the same material as
the first implant.
The claw holds the spool aloft while the visitor’s hands stuff the coils into the steaming
cavity. The process of replacing your wife’s intestines is much lengthier than their removal.
At the very moment the visitor finishes and removes its hands, the spiders rush in, coating
the implant with ooze and using their appendages to weave the severed tissues, vessels, and valves
into the woven mesh of the implant.
The spiders disperse once more, joined by the twelve that have been employed in keeping
the outspread strips of your wife’s flesh pinned down. With a delicacy that verges on daintiness, the
!
visitor takes each flap in its fingers and folds them back over your wife’s abdomen, leaving a bloody,
cockled fissure in the shape of an I. A blanket of spiders sweeps over it.
You can’t even begin to guess how it’s done—evidently the bonding occurs on a cellular
scale—but the spiders mend the wound with such devilish precision that no evidence of a cut
remains. You note, not with a little dismay, that some of the spiders entrenched in the fissure to
repair the shorn muscles were sewn in and left inside by the rest of the brood.
All the needles and tubes are removed from your wife’s body in the reverse order in which
they were inserted, snapping back into the console like retracting extension cords. The site of each
injection is attended by a spider, which plugs and mends the puncture with the same demonic
subtlety. They leave neither scabs nor splotches.
At last the visitor sets your wife’s torn nightgown back in place and steps back as the spiders
stitch it whole. You’re not the least surprised when the restored cloth shows no indication of ever
having been ripped.
Now the spiders spread out over the gore-stained sheets. A hot, caustic steam rises from
their midst, stinging your eyes and nostrils.
They scatter. Every last stain has been cleansed from every smallest fibre at the operation
site.
The visitor stands some distance from the bed and stares.
What happens now?
You squeeze your eyes shut and pray.
The seconds pass into minutes.
It might be your imagination, but the noise and vibrations seem somewhat more bearable
than before, hammering your body and brains less violently.
You open your eyes. The spiders exit the room in droves. As more and more depart, the
noise dampens and the vibrations soften.
The visitor stands and watches them go. The console that stood at its side is nowhere to be
seen, nor are any of its tools. Imponderables upon hideous imponderables.
Underlying your bewildered horror is a mollifying certainty—and a beautiful, billowing relief.
It’s over. You were spared.
The spiders have all gone; their infernal whistling drone has diminished to a faraway hum.
Without giving you or your wife a second glance, the visitor slouches toward the hall. The last you
see of it is a great, grotesque hand taking the knob and shutting the door behind it.
!
All you can hear now is the faint drone of tinnitus and your wife’s soft and steady breathing.
The red digits on the clock read 4:02.
Sleeping is out of the question.
At 5:58, your wife stirs and stretches. She notices you sitting up.
“You’re awake?” she asks.
You tell her you woke up a couple of hours ago and couldn’t fall back asleep. She yawns
sympathetically.
You’ve had plenty of time to think about what you’ll say.
“How did you sleep?” you ask.
“Good,” she replies, getting out of bed. “I’m starving, actually. French toast okay with you?”
Food is the last thing on your mind. Whatever she wants, you tell her.
She splashes some water in her face at the bathroom sink and heads downstairs. The clock
hits 6:00. The alarm activates, switching on the radio.
The reporter bids you good morning and begins a story about an explosion at an oil refinery
on the west coast killing twenty workers and spilling 140,000 gallons of oil into the Pacific.
You switch it off and take a shower.
The cleansing heat and steam are a comfort, but you’re exhausted. You look and feel awful.
Dark purplish bags droop under your eyes; you have the jaundiced complexion of a man afflicted.
You know you didn’t sleep, not even for a minute—but you’ve got that meeting with the Aetna
people, and you don’t have any excuse for missing it. You’ll just have to power through.
You dry off, brush your teeth, and get dressed. On your way out, you notice a black mark on
the ceiling, and you recall the visitor’s prosthetic claw scraping against it during its entrance.
The TV in the kitchen is tuned to NJ News 12, which airs another weeping human interest
story about a cancer patient getting dropped by her insurance provider after she failed to read the
fine print.
Your wife switches it to Good Morning America. They’re all smiles, hosting the long-awaited
reunion of the cast members of a popular soap opera from the 1990s. You eat your wife’s French
toast, even though you don’t have much of an appetite. She’s also fried some sausage. Not wishing
to be rude, you choke it down.
She talks about her itinerary for the day. She plans to get the car washed, go grocery
shopping, buy some light bulbs and a new Dust Buster.
!
You study her mouth as she talks, but it looks more or less the same as it ever did. Her eyes,
though. There’s something different about her eyes.
It's probably just your imagination.
Sounds good, you tell her.
Time to go. You kiss your wife on the lips—with a momentary hesitation you don’t think
she notices—and head out the door.
On the way to the train station, the sombre voices on the radio are still talking about the
refinery explosion. A respected economist speaking over the phone predicts a nationwide price spike
at the pump.
You’re starting to wish you’d had the sense to buy a car that didn’t take premium.
Moments after you board the train, your phone vibrates. It’s your wife. Your blood freezes.
She never calls during the day. Something must be wrong.
She tells you she’s probably going to meet Kathy for coffee at Panera, which is right by
Marshalls, and they’re having a sale. She asks if you if you need any new socks.
That’d be great, you say. Then you blurt out, “Are you feeling okay?”
“Sure,” she answers. “Why?”
You quickly fib that she looked a little pale to you at breakfast, and change the subject in the
same breath.
“If you get a chance, would you mind taking my suit to the dry cleaner’s?”
“Sure. I’ll drop it off when I head to Target later.”
You thank her, tell her you love her, and hang up.
You take the iPad from your satchel and check the news feed. The Times reports that the
slain targets of a recent drone strike in Yemen were actually unarmed civilians, mostly women.
You close out of it and open up Angry Birds. You launch cartoon birds out of a slingshot
until the train arrives at Penn Station.
!
PATRICK ROESLE is a part-time writer living outside of Philadelphia, but originally hails from Jersey.
He maintains a blog called Beyond Easy (beyondeasy.blogspot.com) and a comics page called
Comics Over Easy (comicsovereasy.net). In his spare time he enjoys calculus, astronomy, and noise.
!
RICH IVES
A LARGE SEED FROM THE OLD FOREST
concerning an epigraph to a poem by Meng Chiao
from Poems of the Late T’ang (A. C. Graham)
Here, eat this, said the wooden boy winning at chess,
and the traveler did, and felt satisfied,
but when he got home, he was a hundred and three.
The windy clack of gossiping bamboo,
their inner chambers crowded with phantoms––
how can you know who has wasted a life?
Look! Your axe handle is rotten, said the other boy,
who was losing, and it was, but it had served him well
and had not failed to split apart the earth from its guests.
By finding yourself right, you gain confidence.
By being confident, you find yourself right.
You might never have to go home.
From out of a mumble rises the right thing to say,
and it is not the thing I wanted to say.
I don’t believe I shall say it.
RICH IVES has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust,
Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry,
fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North
American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review,
Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the
Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for
The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He
is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days,
Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at
http://silencedpress.com.
BARDIA SINAEE
ETOBICOKE
Evenings in the Timmy’s near Kipling: privy to breakups,
meltdowns, stock tips whispered through wax paper cups
and fidgety glances from the suburb’s more outgoing shut-ins.
The men’s room has art and amenity: someone’s upturned
a Standard American into a Dadaist fountain,
signed it with handstyle obscenities and pleas to burn THC.
Parked by the drive-thru, young men do things to Hondas,
sync dashboards with Bluetooth, compare slutty auto show blondes on
their phones. Buddy had his ricer impounded
when cops clocked him at 200 on the 401—he founded
an online speed trap exchange. Six-lane traffic on Dundas
follows a gothic procession of hydros downtown.
In the future, the screens here—more than just menus—will feature
overhead satellite feeds of Etobicoke’s myriad plazas
and roads. People will finish their coffee and size up
the monitored clockwork outside, looking for somewhere
private to go.
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Etobicoke. His poetry has most recently
appeared in The Puritan Compendium I and The Walrus. He was recently interviewed over at the Conduit Canada
blog.
MARCUS MCCANN
COVER LETTER
A graceful arrangement of the baubles of your enthusiasm.
Why you matter, retail. An explanation of how
you were gingerbreaded from the dough of their firm at birth.
Your motto is avoidio missteppus. Your interest in grammar
grows abnormally. You long for font synergy.
Your other motto is Chuck Norris does not apply for jobs; jobs
apply for Chuck Norris. You’re ridic. In take two, you simmer
your illustrious history into six slick bullet points. Later,
you cut the least glimmering facet. Autocorrect will react
like a crisis counsellor. The person you are describing
is awesome, you realize, or pathological. Your draft reflects you
the way a can of Diet Coke does. You delete If I were a question,
I would be burning because it is an awkward topic sentence.
In draft three, you shift the Most Polished Paragraph
into The Power Position. It is above you. You count to ten.
You mamabird your rebuttals into the beaks
of their tacit objections. You pour in “professional register”
as if from a tap of weak beer. Sincerely, you write, sincerely. Sincerely …
MARCUS MCCANN is a poet and journalist. He is the author of Soft Where (2009, Chaudiere Books)
and The Hard Return (2012, Insomniac) and a number of chapbooks, including The Glass Jaw (2010,
Bywords) Town in a Long Day of Leaving (2010, above/ground), and Force Quit (2008, The Emergency
Response Unit). He is a winner of the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal, and was
shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and the Robert Kroetsch awards. He now lives in Toronto,
where he studies law.
SANDRA LLOYD
INCLINED TO MOON
We saw a particular moon on a particular morning
and rated both moon and morning poem-worthy
although I don’t, as a rule, assemble
collections of phonemes for the moon, or sun, or sea,
or love. The moon appeared at its largest,
butter yellow nearing the hazy horizon
a disproportionate scrapbook cutout
on blue paper dusted with glitter, exaggerated
by placement and because it told us
to take note. We tried to say something
in our moon-moment but uttered nothing
other than oh, and wow; our mouths
moon-circles until we had to admit
there were no shapes
to fill this particular lack.
SANDRA LLOYD received a Bachelor of Science degree from U of T, a Nursing Diploma from
Humber College, and is currently pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing at U of T. Her prose and
poetry have appeared in publications including The Antigonish Review, The Windsor Review, and Other
Voices. She received a literary prize from MSVU in Halifax, served on the advisory board for
McMaster University’s Main Street Anthology and is a member of the Hamilton Poetry Centre.
PETER NORMAN
THE HABIT
What germ
lodged in marrow
drives the jaw to clench?
My left-hand pinkie gets it worst,
bowed from the upper knuckle,
wimpled in a mess of calluses.
Its neighbour shows white blots
where nail-bed and keratin are cleft;
the middle finger’s reddened by incisors.
On it goes: all ten,
frozen in distress like set meringue.
Scar-tissue canyons. Tattered cuticles.
Bristles where a patch of hair
I gnawed to near-extinction
struggled back, now prodigal
and coarse. I wish I knew the root.
But worry keeps a private sacrament.
Worry speaks in ciphers while I sleep.
And though I’ve dined on creatures
innocent of any sin,
it is my own, my sullied skin
this habit has me taste.
Should a slab of meat work free
and slither to the gullet,
then will the exalted peace
that passes understanding reach
and heal my gristle’s nervous gist?
Will I be sated if I self-digest?
The stomach waits with valve ajar,
broods on its wealth of hollows.
TWENTY FUGITIVES
Night shift, and the part-time guard
crams for his Armageddon practicum.
The froth of lust that mounts before meiosis
doubles when meiosis is achieved.
Iconoclast antics left a mound of shards,
knotted wrack and bladder wrack,
saxifrage oasis in the sand.
The vertebrae of zipper click apart.
Troubles with mildew. Troubles with fat moths.
I fear you aren’t in any way Icelandic.
They’ve grown and grown, these damn worms.
We all know what the wolf said.
Midnight is the real face of noon.
You say that’s meaningless? Say what you will.
Sunlight—now there’s an athlete.
Runs in eight minutes a million marathons.
Excised eyes in murderous clusters
plummet from the clouds.
Someone hollers, hawking knick-knacks.
The final word, again, is fury’s.
PETER NORMAN’s first poetry collection, At the Gates of the Theme Park (Mansfield Press, 2010), was
a finalist for the Trillium Poetry Book Award. His second, Water Damage, is forthcoming from
Mansfield Press in March 2013. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various magazines and
anthologies, including Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets and two editions of The Best Canadian Poetry in
English.
BEN LADOUCEUR
OX
That was our last unripe year, rib cages bald, bright
and evermore palpable. The county’s only faggot bar
had just swapped its signage from hand-painted
to Helvetica. We drank as though new policies had
activated, and we were too measly to grandfather.
The men inside covered in slobber and glitter, I felt
unreflective, so filthy, a pauper. Did someone
say poppers! would blurt Alexander, and his asshole
would begin to open wide. Outside, the rain arrived
as if on a curfew. And we had curfews too.
If I ever got a tattoo—I confessed, walking through
the dirty water, through the lightning’s penmanship—
across my ribs, a zebra mussel, inching imperceptibly
away. One good word half-hidden in the slime of its
meander, maybe EPILOGUE, maybe OCCIDENT.
Alexander protested, because everything I did was on
purpose. It filled my heart with helium. Occident, I
emphasized. Not Accident. Ox. His insufficient
moustache hairs had caught one drop of rain.
Crickets scraped songs off their bodies with their legs.
ALWAYS GREENER
There you are
he says and I say
that’s what I keep
telling myself. Imagine Laika
writing letters
to the runt
from her litter
about the colour
of the grass.
The envelope
burning up well before
the lithosphere.
When I awaken
my whereabouts are murky
but not a large concern.
When moths gnaw the toque
I crocheted it becomes
a come rag.
In outer space a dog
dies and later, in
Soviet Russia, another.
One saw twenty sunsets in a day.
Both saw their worlds
in black and white and grey.
WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA
A challenge is a dare there’s
a better word for. Brother, you never
kept those ambitions at bay and now just
look, the sun is gone, the bats are making
love. Our bed was like a tantrum, warm
and so impossible to leave. There were
acres of it; their death cast
a musk across the squash. “It” being
orchard bark, abandoned.
An acre being a unit of measurement I
could never, ever fathom, even
today, with a summertime of farming
under my belt. Acorn, spaghetti, butternut:
I liked them best inedible and decorative.
For that matter, I liked this song more
when I thought the composer placed his
head in an oven. The song is called “Ghost.”
I have come around to the squash’s
taste, the wax and wane of its orange
which speaks of other, more enormous
oranges. It is the same rhetoric
every flammable autumn:
Get it done, move along, go to bed.
If I cannot do it, brother, I want you
to hollow me out.
BEN LADOUCEUR lives in Toronto. His poems have been published in magazines like Prism International, The
Malahat Review, Arc, Dragnet, and Echolocation.
JESSICA COMOLA
I SAW A SWAN COME OUT OF THE WATER
I.
Rings are the easiest things to steal.
I had to ask a man to stop taking pictures.
One time I saw a swan come out of the water
to drown a dog.
You only have to try them on.
To drag it under and drown it.
One time I left eight naked velvet fingers.
This man put me inside him and I went.
II.
This man had a silver ring with a pinch in it.
I worked in a laboratory for years.
Holidays as first dates are impossible.
There we dyed thin slices of mice-brain
until they glowed pink. My God—
I said, you’re too young for me.
—they were beautiful things.
If I were his wife I’d have swallowed it.
III.
I know how to take nearly anything.
Begin with I want you and work back
is how it seems to go. One time
I stole a man’s dog. Put it between my legs
and drove off with it.
The mice came in dead to us.
It was a little thing. I stole once.
A frozen ring around their necks to mark them.
HOLOGRAMS
1.
However small, we come to wonder
how our power is every great small.
We make ourselves ready, each to us according:
such visitation is a great filament.
When we are bodies, which almighty small
we may appear:
how, natural.
how, manifold.
2.
Such vision is a figurehead we hold with our everything.
However small the worshipper of us all—
O, of us, here, the small same.
3.
Gaze together which were under mortality together.
Gene together which were under mother together.
Gem together which were under matter together.
We come together, which, astonished, shall receive.
They are the work of the same that are thy work.
4.
Mother: all that what might be,
there is always other echoing.
When we are bodies that make each other
under almighty and wonder
let us come to see one figurehead.
Let us in visions.
In visions let us small
wonder. We are
filament, then go under.
JESSICA COMOLA is currently an MFA student at the University of Mississippi. Her work has
appeared or is forthcoming in Everyday Genius, Anti-, The Journal and HTML Giant, among others.
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA
I REMEMBER
I remember Hopscotch and roller-skates.
I remember when my father learned to roller-skate. He fell on his right cheek and it turned
plum-purple.
I remember my parents practicing ballroom dancing in the living room. My mother wore a
twirly skirt and my father wore his black souliers. The carpet they danced on was green like grass.
I remember my brother laughing so hard, a giant green booger landed in the sand in the
playground.
I remember asking for a picture of a boy I liked. He signed the back of it like he was famous.
I just wanted the picture.
I remember going to Sunday School and being asked to leave. I was colouring paper-cut
angels, which formed a king’s crown. I was wearing it when I left the class.
I remember learning to ride a two-wheeler without the training wheels. It was pink and had a
basket in front, but I never put anything in there.
I remember burying pennies in the ground, thinking they’d grow into trees just because I was
told they didn’t. I just wanted to see for myself.
I remember someone at school told me a bee could still sting you even though it was dead. I
saw a dead one behind the curtain and touched the pointy end. It’s true. It does sting you.
I remember being on a swing and swinging toward a bumblebee. It could not be avoided. It
hit the centre of my forehead and fell to the ground bouncing like a rubber ball. I got off the swing
to take a look at it. It lay in the sand, still. I was embarrassed for the thing. It just didn’t have a
chance.
I remember dissecting a white rat. I pinned it down and broke two of its joints. The
instructions said to start the cut at the hole near its back. My lab partner, Brian, turned his head away
and said he didn’t want to do it. I wanted to impress him and picked up the scissors and shoved
them in. Cut open, there was a brown sack, the shape of an earlobe. I took it out, labeled it, but then
went and cut that open too. It gave off a bad smell. I knew then, it had to be the stomach for sure.
The heart couldn’t carry that kind of rot.
I remember trying to fit my size-five feet into a size-three shoe just because it was cheaper.
I remember riding the bus for fifty cents.
I remember yo-yos and hula-hoops.
I remember when my co-worker got married. He left his computer password on a yellow
notepad for me and said he’d be back in a week.
I remember throwing out my red running shoes and Vincent, who lived next to the laundry
room of the apartment building, returning them to me because he knew they were mine. He tied the
laces.
I remember a friend stealing a dictionary from the classroom for me because she knew I
didn’t have one at home and that I wanted one. She took it out of her knapsack and gave it to me in
the parking lot. We quickly climbed a metal fence and on the other side we started to run like we
were being chased, but no one was after us.
I remember auditioning for Little Red Riding Hood in a school play. It was the scene after
the wolf told me he would eat me. I fell to the ground and pretended to die. I stuck my tongue out
at the corner of my mouth to look dead, but I didn’t get the part.
I remember telling my Home Ec teacher I wanted to be a model. She said I was too short.
She hung her lingerie in the classroom and flirted with the repairman. She taught us how to cook
pizza and pigs-in-a-blanket. We baked cakes and they always collapsed in the middle.
I remember handwriting.
I remember buying a lot of white dresses. When I got married I wore none of those.
I remember when I had to dial a phone.
I remember when I had a pen pal in Loon Rapids, Minnesota. We wrote three letters to each
other and then I sent him a photograph of me. He never wrote back after that.
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA won the 2004 ReLit Prize for her first poetry book, Small
Arguments. Pedlar Press will release her new collection in September 2013.
RODNEY WILHITE
THEFT
Windshields shatter easily with only a small chip
of her mother’s broken porcelain. People often leave
emergency twenties in the glovebox. Her father leaves
love letters in the floorboard
from a woman whose name she doesn’t recognize.
A neighbor keeps a fawn caged inside a chicken-coop.
It skitters, nimble legs and grunting breath
in the dark. She whispers, Come here, I’m sorry.
Angel, come here. Once, she aimed
her rifle at her uncle’s sleeping head.
Drunken, he was dreamless,
bundled in her mother’s deathbed quilt—
already a corpse down her sights.
She let the hammer strike the empty chamber anyway.
RODNEY WILHITE is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. His work has previously
appeared in Cartographer, Splash of Red and elsewhere. A native of rural northeastern Oklahoma, he
currently lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
FINN HARVOR
nHI-lizm
1.
lootenant sed to sarge
sum bad guyz r still in da ville
so sarge told da patrol
u gotta shoot ta kill
2.
da phos4us iz pretty
when it lites da sky
but when hitz da kidz
it just burnz n burnz
like a fyre dat wurmz
n most of da suckerz
die
3.
sometimes da suckerz
crawl from dere homes
all starvin n hungry n shit.
sarge dont like it
he tellz em where to shove it
but after dere gone
he sez dere kidz r cute—
u no,
a
liddl
bit.
4.
da suckerz took a hit
n sarge
real pissed
wuz screamin n swearin
n sayin
whatd dey effin expect?
all smilin n wavin n walkin
thru da perimeter
n shit.
5.
da grunts of skwad 1
wuz humpin thru da hillz
dere werent no peepl
n da moon wuz cold
n da mood wuz spooky
n da war seemed old
6.
even da suckerz hooz eyes r filled wit h8
look up at da sky
when dey here de jetz
n think, da fighters look gr8
7.
da ville was blasted
n da perimeter broke
n da grunts wuz starvin
while da flarez 4 da choppers
burned bright, den snuffed out.
n all u cud here wuz barkin
n all u cud c wuz smoke.
FINN HARVOR is a Canadian artist and writer, and lives with his wife in South Korea. He’s
published art and writing in Eclectica, Canadian Notes and Queries, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The
Korea Times, Dogmatika, Dark Sky, the Quarterly Conversation, rabble, the HUFS International Journal of
Foreign Studies, The Globe and Mail, Now Weekly, The Canadian Forum, This Magazine and several
other publications. He’s written and staged two fringe plays, and had his work broadcast by the
CBC [radio]. He has had group and solo shows of his drawings, and continues to experiment
with art-and-text work. Finally, he blogs at Conversations in the Book Trade.
ROBIN RICHARDSON
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN BLACKBEARD AND CALICO JACK
Bedding every picaroon from Blue Moon
to some motel off the interstate. It’s loot
that gets me going: gold enough to make me
Midas touch myself, those human jewelthieves clogging with the searchlights
of Sing Sing. I’ll play warden, enforce
the auburn system so your silence keeps
us both in line.
The tide in eyesight, all your
mermaids throwing rogue waves
at our window; silly, willing slaves. They
only want your mars mascara-ed lashes
batting once for every inch of dick
you give them. My casual encounter counting
back from riches to the rags we wrapped
our shipwrecked selves in.
ROBIN RICHARDSON is the author of Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press) and the forthcoming
Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis (ECW Press). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in
many journals including Tin House, Arc, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and The Cortland
Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the ReLit award, longlisted for the CBC Poetry Award, and
has won the John B. Santoianni Award (awarded by The Academy of American Poets) and the Joan
T. Baldwin Award. Robin Richardson holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and is
currently living in Nova Scotia.
!
!
LIZ HOWARD
THE WORLD IS EVERYTHING THAT IS THE CASE
0. Invocation
If I am something
I compose an edifice
Firstly, in this
Instead of working I have
Been reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
And laughing my ass off. That I find
It to be the most hilarious thing I’ve
Read in recent memory is surly
Some sort of cosmological-grade
Reaction formation, e.g.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm).
Yeah.
The corollary dysfunction to this appended place
Is my lack of structure so I invoke
And hope to be made better by surrendering this shit will
To a circumference
Conjured by my inept I
So you can see
How badly I’d love to be fucked and forget about it just now
Kathy Acker writes about how as a child she
Wanted to be a pirate but not being a stupid child
Knew this couldn’t be
And also something about gender
And I think about how we sell the content of our
So-called selves online and thieve it back as identity
And probably these are the thoughts
Of an idiot
In a biblical parataxis of begetting
!
!
!
I too was a pirate; marauding the genesis
Of my being a fucking lunatic
Here is a list of terms from my memoir:
Walter Benjamin
Crack
Winnie the Pooh
Sault Ste Marie
Virgin Mary
Seascapes
Benson & Hedges
Snowsuit
Duplex
Illegitimate
Hippocampus
Nietzsche
Resilience
Baudrillard
Jack pine
Sudbury
Auster
I want you
All memory is a kind of death
Smiling
And
Every love poem is
A self-portrait of childhood
Really, maybe
Dwight Yoakam in tan leather pants telling me he’s a thousand miles from nowhere
‘There’s no place I wanna be’
1. The Appearance of Reality in Itself
A fly on my arm with metallic orange thorax and legs that look too long
There for a moment
I can still feel it when it’s gone
!
!
!
It is real and it is a desert
And I’m there but hypnagogically
Ariana Reine’s book Mercury’s cover is reflective silver
Like its liquid namesake I look back
At myself
The door is a jar
The impulse to recycle myself but it’s never enough
WE CAN DO IT—that we are the same in
Suffering fools gladly?
Synaesthesia means
A is red in my mind and the number 1 is white
These are only facts of my excess qualia
And nothing more
How’s that for solipsism
And in answer yes my heart does harbour a holy whore
All that stuff
Inimical
As the perjured self before the days’ tarry of hooks
And indigenous bits
If but for colour
And so also
2 is red in my mind and the letter I is white
2. Neither Nor
The sky opened up onto my stupid face
In the north
I was nineteen and begging for Orion
To relieve me
Of an abject longing for stasis
Marshes sullied
Trenchant pleura
Stuccoed purpose
Beseeched me
!
!
!
In the flagrant errors of any small girl there is
The stuff of fables whether false or guileless
This happened a lot
My mother combing through trash at the landfill I’m twelve
And there were ravens and black bears and an air of death
I sat in the back of the flatbed truck knees to my chest
Reciting ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow …’
From the entrance the gatekeeper smiled without teeth
And winked at me
Fatherless for six years that second winter
In the welfare duplex when the oil heat ran out
I’m seven and then it is twenty years later
I sit in the innocuous green of late summer what use am I
I am the one who is unfolding in full view
For no one
In particular
I rested one foot on the curb, the other
On the roof of the world’s mouth
Than myself
This is
Too large
High beams along the dividing line of the highway
So I take my galvanic bath outdoors
To complicate any transmutable or derelict vowel
If even your forests abandon the crucible of self
And grow weary into a climax of fur
And Manitouwadge, Manitoba, Manitoulin in situ
And it is neither I nor the white of it or you
Who are yellow and black and gold
Orion
I guess
We all should have been born on a Tuesday
!
!
!
3. Careless
One night I dreamt a man cut
Off his foreskin and threw it at me
And then he cut off his testicles and threw them at me.
Gathering them up I said, “uh, should we go to the hospital?”
“No,” he said, indignant. “You’ll have to live with this.
For I have made my covenant with loss.”
There is all that I do not hold in a percept
There is no part I do not give away
There is no holding out for love
Take the ditch
Suddenly the entire
ness
Invented judgement
*
Timid enclaves
I am your champion
This is after all our inverted stronghold of need
Let it taste you
*
Is it really necessary for me to say anything what is it necessary for me to say
I don’t know anything I have no referent give it up that largesse all that stuff
*
In the after of
How can I subsume my design?
I can I do not I who cannot subsume my design?
All creatures here sing or reek of subjectivity
It is the marrow of the shift
It is the marrow of the shift of how the present is never truncated enough for taste
I do not apologize I do not reflect
!
!
!
!
Only signify with each tenant toward the mammal’s being a percept
If only
The knapsack forsaken the antacid left astray
I can’t carry it all
Singularly
As I repurpose several ungodly stomachs for cud which is to say
Intention
The counteraction is my splendid tile work
The orator unspools from each tendon some ghastly new
We have it in the bag of civilized content
We are in a season a season surrounds us the season is the dominant narrative I had
A dream to this effect
I place my foot in the frame of a vehicle
I place my foot into the frame of a vehicle in motion and become predisposed to loving
Whatever really couldn’t
Care less
LIZ HOWARD is an MFA student in creative writing at the University of Guelph and lives in Toronto. She is
a member of the Influency Salon editorial group and co-cultivates the AvantGarden Reading Series. Her work
has appeared in The Capilano Review, ditch,, Matrix, and Misunderstandings Magazine. In 2009 she was shortlisted
for the LitPop Award for poetry. Skullambient, her first chapbook (Ferno House Press, 2011) was recently
nominated for the bp Nichol Chapbook Award.
Poem, Phone, Farm: An Antithetical Multiform Influx Composed on the 18th-19th of August 2012,
My Last Full Day on the Recently Sold Family Farm
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“all things dying each other’s life,
living each other’s death”
—W. B. Yeats
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Contents
Song of the Makers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Googlauguspex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Panoramic Coulee Palindrome . . . . . 7
Twitter in the Skies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Igloo in the Avalanche. . . . . . . .11
Halftone Rubbing Stone . . . . . . . . . 12
A Comment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Inverted Panorama of My Face
at Night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
Ballad of the Follower. . . . . . . . . . . 17
by dst
for the Tysdals who
worked this land
Song of the Makers
composed by the iSeeng app
One maker he made love
to a grain truck filled with wheat;
he feared a special child—
part pesticide, part seed,
part Wonderbread, part man—
would capture every ear
and ripen all the headlines
but die within a year.
Another maker dug
a dugout with his hands.
Rainclouds freed that hollow
of creature-sapping sand.
He would have dug a mountain
if that was Work’s request.
The time of dust he’d moisten.
He’d wake the age of rest.
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“Photo of a Photo of the Original Homestead (circa 1931)
with! Me (circa 2012) Reflected in the Glass”
Lyrics Generated from this Image by iSeeng
For every gut to hunger,
one maker spread a feast;
another stopped the bleeding—
she taught the wounds to read.
What links these different makers
and those beyond this poem
frames the cross-stitched adage:
“The Heart Comes First, then Home.”
The difference between makers
and those who simply make
salvages the earth
from flood and fear—the quake.
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1
Googlauguspex: Google Goggles Divines the Will of the Gods from Unsacrificed Animals and
Birdless Skies
Question
Section
Signs
Are You, the
gods, in favour
of this move?
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Is the harvest
being
undertaken in
accordance
with Your
will?
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2
Is this an
auspicious
marriage? !
If all is
divinely
condoned, send
the sign.
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3
If you will
change the
sign, sing the
song.
!
Is what I have
in mind
possible?
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4
Is this as close
as I will get to
the truth?
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Is this?
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5
Or this?
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6
Panoramic Coulee Palindrome
composed with the Pano app
Grass was ghostlike. You, bawling,
needed dad, needed him to carry you
from hill through coulee to hill. This fear,
changed, remains. The grass is time past,
bountiful nothing of these lands:
all substance, no space. Once, right here,
psychedelic-bombed, witnessing all around
you (centred while circling) all animals
are here, all numbers, all marking, winds,
grandpa-given peppermints, mom’s reaching
out, shouts of “Jayne the Pain, Neutron,
play,” seasons, hovering surveys. Wrong?
This is. But no things are just symbols
for themselves. Shores here swallow waters. All
trees are books, gyred; gyred, books are trees.
All waters swallow here. Shores themselves for
symbols just are. Things? No! But is this
wrong? Surveys hovering, season’s play,
Neutron Pain, the Jayne of shouts, outreaching moms, peppermints given, grandpa,
winds marking all numbers, all here are
animals, all circling, while centred you,
around all, witnessing bombed. Psychedelic
here, right? Once space, no, substance, all
lands, these of nothing . . . . Bountiful,
past time is grass. The remains changed
fear. This hill to coulee through hill from you,
carry to him. Needed dad needed
bawling you. Ghostlike was grass.
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7
Twitter in the Skies: Tweets Harvested After Keats in Honour of Our Farm’s Final Harvest
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5
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8
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10
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9
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The first stanza of John Keats’ “To Autumn” was re-composed by (in order): @josholmstrom;
@CapitalGagaX; @amoz1939; @BabyWasu; @RobynCarangi; @IvankaVolkova;
@SamanthaSmithWX; @garjones; @OutbreakQL; @fylupz; @ImCuteBubblez;
@TheGrayIdentity; @michaelcfiore; @ERogTweets2Much; @ozecok; @EmmDeee11;
@Briley_212; @Abbie_Cat; @britneyspears; @KCreechan7; @siah.
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10
The Igloo in the Avalanche
composed by the iSeeng app
“The Igloo in the Avalanche”
is not our holy song’s lone name.
There’s “Wooden Shack in Wood Tornado”,
“Doll’s House Packed in Doll’s Doll Brain.”
The home of which we sing’s a heart
whose love’s as shallow as a spoon
patterned from the sky that holds
all skies, the noon to first hearth wombs.
A lack of saviours is not salvation.
Salvation is not a saviour’s staff.
And though the first to crow’s not best,
he still, so new, with fury, laughs.
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“Screencap of ‘Ballad of the Makers’”
Lyrics Generated from this Image by iSeeng
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11
Halftone Rubbing Stone: The Untold Origins of the Great Rock’s End
composed with the Halftone app
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12
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13
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14
A Comment: Facebook Friends Reply to a Request for an Assessment of the Dimensions of a
Thing
Entropy. It looks like father's day. These are obviously the leftover parts from an old-timey robotic
exoskeleton used to combat the Nazi menace during WWII. Lucasfilm garage sale, January 3 1978. The
death of the Industrial Age. Tetanus. Sadness, rust, decay, and the pollution of nature. Breaking News.
Recently Dolphin archeologists have uncovered what appears to be old pottery that indicates that there
might have been some sort of intelligent life living on Earth, before us. This find is that definitive proof, of
the existence of an ancient race that evolved from the sea, moved and thrived on the land above us, and
then something cataclysmic occurred that wiped out this race before us. History.... The dead parts of our
past - stored away, just in case of emergency - about to be thrown out, or melted down & made into a
decorative container used to hold more leftover parts. A mosaic. Pour a vat o' clear polymer in there, let it
harden and hang it on a wall...with a really strong hook, sunk into a stud. A nest. The heart of many things
of many year's work combined into one box. The Gearhead’s Requiem. It's a memento box. There's the
bicycle chain that broke on their first date, and the belt buckle that was chosen with such care, every piece
with a story of its own and I'm sure there's a medal in there somewhere, that lets everyone know how
bravely he fought and how brokenhearted she was when she buried that box and said goodbye. I try to
imagine how it all got there...where it came from...who all participated in each little piece’s journey to that
box. Really - if you were able to take any one of those bolts/nuts/various bits out and trace back their
existence I suspect it would be quite interesting...Seeing them like that makes me think quite clearly that
every journey must end...some result in new beginnings and some don't...Your family moving off the farm
reminds me of how I feel when I
go back to Moose Jaw or Nova Scotia
and drive by places we used to live
as kids...stirs up many many memories
and makes me wish I could turn
back the clock.... Rusty junk. A milk
crate. You know you're not
supposed to keep those things right?
They are the exclusive property of
the dairy company! I see a decay two
times removed from my own. I'm
from a place people left farms to work
in factories at, and now the
factories are gone. I'm always
surprised by how industrial farms
are. Our advances chase us away from
what we once did. I'm curious
about the metallic guy printed on the
box (jauntily holding a cane?). The
stuff inside looks like his body parts
from long, long ago.... Reminds
me of when life was lived at a slower
pace
and
combine
chains
broke...... !...an art installation.... The
bits we recovered from The Iron
Giant. The end of the family farm.
Adventures both memorable and
forgettable. The nuts and bolts and
odds and ends that hold/held your
! past together, ready to be used again
for a new future and a past that's
already happening. (No pressure.)
Future steampunk jewellery materials- now available for rusty- slightly rusted- and acrylicized editions.
Brown. Dusty chunks. Body parts. I see something that looks like a bicycle chain - or is this a box of
jewelry? Mining site comes to mind. Discarded tools that watched many a story pass them by. Go number
two: nuts, bolts, a pedal, bits of a bike or chainsaw chain, some clamps, misc mites of iron and the bolt
box guy, in blue. Literally. Rust. And so the word Rust reminds me of when my Mom said she could never
warm to modern sculpture of rusted wrought iron, because it reminded her too much of the much dreaded
decay of farm equipment, equipment where every tiny bit and piece including lengths of string were kept
"just in case," the supply was never endless on the farm only the need was. Every farmer a mechanical
genius, with or without instruction manual, I see here a cardboard box with an industrial illustration of a
robot-man made of nuts and bolts, it looks very familiar to me (so that means it's vintage!) and is quite
possibly styled after the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz staring Judy Garland, which instantly causes me to hum
Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a location void of rust and decay once and always longed for none-the-less
(I've typed None-the-Less twice today on Facebook, and wonder what does it all really mean?). The excollection of a beggar whose last dream was to make a widget. He didn't know what a widget looked like,
but smart people in nice suits always talked of widget-making factories and how the whole world ran on
them. He knew he wasn't smart enough to run the world, but with his two hands he could make another
widget for the world. And so he collected the leftover pieces that could make metal veins and metal
hearts, that he thought were useful, that gave breath to every mechanical toy without blood and tears. It's
funny how years of neglect can result in a collection of objects that would have fascinated me for hours as
a child. Is it immature to admit that it still does excite my imagination?
Special thanks to: Zsofi, Nathaniel, Vance, Rocky, Ross, Mooch, Ari, Kathy, Cassidy, Lee, Stacey, Bill, Sven, Sean, Ted, Katie,
Mom, Anne, Moh, Steven, Kevin, Sadaf, May, Ryan, Mat, Karen, Alexander, Arif, Lynn, Odette, Joshua, and Janice.
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15
Inverted Panorama of My Face at Night
composed with the Pano app
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16
Ballad of the Follower
composed by the iSeeng app
A marionette, it’s true, I am,
but I pick my puppeteer;
a second set of strings runs from
my heart to my Master’s ear.
I even chose my recent role
as the fourth—the late—Magi.
The empty Manger in Act One
I worship as that Child.
Act Two begins: I’m singing songs
in praise of the Missing’s balm.
Act Three I dance the Danse Absentia.
Act Four’s “The Follower’s Psalm”:
“I do not follow followers;
I follow following.
The fallow path’s within the path
and flowers the fringes string.”
Our routine done, my Master asks,
“You’re free. Why don’t you leave?”
“If I wait here, the Second Coming
will have to follow me.”
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“Inverted Panorama of My Face at Night”
Lyrics Generated from this Image by iSeeng
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17
“RESTIVE PLACES AT THE END OF TIME”:
A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Probably Inevitable
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto, ON M5S 3J4
2012, $17.95 CDN, $15.99 US, ISBN: 9781552452615
REVIEW BY PHOEBE WANG
Though I staked my claim to writing at a young age, my Dad advocated a grounding in the sciences
as a means to foster rationality and method. Unlike most teenagers, I was eager to please, so I signed
up for chemistry, algebra, geometry, and calculus, which perhaps also showed an early predilection
for suffering. Had I not been mortified by derivatives and imaginary numbers fifteen years ago, the
title of Matthew Tierney’s third volume of poetry, Probably Inevitable, wouldn’t have recalled graphing
a horizontal asymptote on blue-lined paper. To save you the trouble of Googling it, an asymptote is,
essentially, a line that continuously approaches a given curve but does not intersect with it. It was a
pleasure to draw the tiny arms of the x and y axis with my Steadtler mechanical pencil, and the
curved sloping line representing a function that never hits zero as x approaches infinity.
Probably Inevitable expresses Tierney’s views on time, human evolution and certainty. Like the
graph of a limit at infinity, modern culture, human relationships and even one’s run of luck appear
to slope gradually toward meaninglessness, yet they never reach the lines drawn in our imaginations.
We might be reasonably certain about the trajectory of our lives, but the predicted outcome is not
assured. That outcome depends on what we’ve inherited, another significant concern of Tierney’s
work. Probably Inevitable expresses a kind of limited optimism about our futures, a hedging of bets.
The laws of thermodynamics, Einstein’s theories, Quantum mechanics, Planck’s constant,
and gravity are engrossing enough topics to hijack any poet’s attention. Instead, Tierney employs
this subject matter to explore questions about how we arrived at this place in time, with these
particular antecedents, relationships, recollections, habits and histories. In so doing, he avoids the
tendency of other science poets, whose work, as Michael Lista asserted in his recent review, “for all
its conceptual savvy, all too often feels bereft of feeling.” That certainly is not the case in a poem
such as “Speed Dating in the Milky Way,” wherein the speaker’s fraught attitude toward the passage
of time dovetails with his feelings toward our current obsession with efficiency, even in matters of
the heart. Time and space in a Tierney poem are allusive and endlessly qualitative: the universe is
“clockwork,” space is “Euclidean,” a “Planck time interval” is “paper-thin” and our solar system is
“stubbornly self-centred.”
Tierney describes abstract concepts with domestic and familiar
characteristics, imbuing them with poignancy, and at times, with pain.
This discomfiture is an unavoidable consequence of treating the poem as a “time machine,”
a suggestion that Tierney made in his essay for The New Quarterly and Arc Poetry Magazine’s joint
double issue on science. In it, he proposes viewing time as knowledge, and the poem as “smashed
time.” He also outlines the work of renowned physicist Julian Barbour, whose 2008 book The End of
Time: The Next Revolution of Physics gave rise to the long poem “That Stratospheric Streak My Green
Filament” at the core of Probably Inevitable. Barbour claims that motion is merely illusion, and that an
unchanging configuration of things makes up the entirety of the universe. We can think of each
instant as a “time capsule” rich with the physical manifestations of our unique past, such as fossils
and genes, records that exist in the present as we do. We’re biased toward the idea of a linear history,
but does this bias exist in nature?
Barbour’s theories set off Tierney’s preoccupation with chronology. Poems compulsively
inspect and catalogue the scattered fragments of his memories, pop culture, human history, and
geology, as if trying to prove that “the finer we measure the present, the wilder/ our stab at the
future.” The juxtaposition of profundities with the mundane and quotidian details of modern life
renders the poems more emotionally resonant. YouTube videos, fairytales, comic books, pieces of
music and beloved albums– reading these poems is like shuffling a lifetime’s worth of memories on
an iPod, a collection of cultural moments in which the speaker finds himself reflected. “Too much?”
the speaker asks, answering affirmatively:
Too
much. General—no, blanket contrition, for a string
of acts of omission that imagination has scared
into memory. Experience is elusive; to identify
pain as phantom spares you none of its throb.
Phantoms and the missing parts of ourselves are also imagined in “That Stratospheric Streak My
Green Filament,” a sequence investigating Barbour’s notion that time does not exist. Many poems in
Probably Inevitable deal with the consequences of this possibility, but “That Stratospheric Streak …”
specifically confronts the fallout of time’s absence on the poet’s bright and jumbled recollections of
childhood and past loves: “the initial ordered state creates history:/ pell-mell drifts down, vibrations
in air become sound.”
A sense of loss pervades this long poem, because while he attempts to orient himself, there
is also a letting-go. The speaker attempts to relinquish the desire to view his life in sequential order,
to prioritize one event over another, and to organize time around a pivot or focal point. In the
poem’s first section, the possibility of reconciling time is stalked like prey through the seasons, and
Tierney reveals, “I halt and take in how loud, clumsy, unmistakable I’ve been./ Wherever I am now/
becomes in retrospect my yellow sun.” Repeatedly, the speaker acknowledges his lack of centre,
evoking spectres of Yeats’ wandering falcon. Yet despite the seemingly incoherent disorder of
“these days without sequence,” the speaker can “make out clearly the space-time grid/ around the
child in the playground.” Tierney embeds passages of The End of Time throughout the poem,
exploring Barbour’s theory that records are all we have. How does this bear upon nuclear families or
a series of exes? Even when there’s “no love left … time spent together is imprinted,/a fossil with
clear antecedents.”
Probably Inevitable’s later sections continue to ponder how the absence of time bears upon our
day-to-day lives, but these poems have a more conversational tone:
You ask how it all started
and I belt out ‘Dunno’ with the certainty of a bass
doo-wopping the close.
You insist, so here it goes:
13.7 billion years ago, before she blows,
the universe is a restive place.
With its barrage of references and densely-packed imagery, Tierney’s diction will hold some readers
at a distance. Indeed, the technology-steeped language and Tierney’s fluid ease with concepts from a
wide range of disciplines, combined with his clipped imperatives and bantering tone, can be
daunting. It’s important to push through the fragmented style to the humour and playfulness of the
poems. They display a delight in contrasting the grandiosity of scientific terminology with the
ordinariness of eating breakfast, going golfing, taking a family vacation. There is a truly exuberant
pleasure in language expressed in metaphors such as “tumbleweeds of O2,” “counterfactuals pile up
like cornflakes pile up/like models of megamolecules” and “galaxies fanning out like patches of
demin.” Tierney finds time, space, matter, particles and the processes that form life on Earth
endlessly diverting and chaotic. He, or his poet-persona, would be the ideal party guest, someone
who could explain different kinds of infinity over a few pilsners in a way that you’d be sure to
remember. The poems try to share their delight and absurdity, and perhaps we’re encouraged not to
take things too seriously, but to find “a joy not possible/ before the big bang made creation some
sweet place.”
Since thematically the book grapples with plot and linearity, the leaps and linguistic swivels
may be justified in that the style manifests the subject matter. The sharp, meandering thoughts
reflect the speaker’s questioning of a single, overarching version or narrative. By the fourth and final
section, Tierney’s poetic voice hits its stride, even while turning the most prosaic of events and
settings into song. The poems of this section have a stronger momentum, with a greater quantity of
flexing, electrifying lines, like “Photons bank off the window frame, fool no one,/ mere minutes on
a zip line from the sun,” or, “Most fantasy is born of tragedy,/ most death in the wild from wornout teeth,/ fossils painstakingly tooth-brushed.” Like his contemporaries, poets Jeramy Dodds and
Kevin Connolly, who gave their feedback on this manuscript, Tierney has a fondness for evasiveness
and for the double-entendre. Titles give clues about the wordplay contained in the poems: “Size
Extra Medium,” “Addressing Human Resources,” “International Date Line” and “Primed for
Contact.”
Tierney’s fascination with subculture and contemporary phenomena may prompt some to
read his poems with smartphones in hand, Wikipedia bookmarked. I don’t believe it’s always
necessary to look up film titles and breakfast foods and proper names, because with the array of
associations, the poet’s aim is to locate himself within a moment of time. It’s a moment that has a
tinge of Gen X, existential malaise and cautious optimism, yet also of creativity and innovation. It’s
the first generation to understand the reach of the Internet and social media, while managing to
maintain its individuality in relation to it. Yet this cultural moment is not meant to be relatable to all
audiences or readers; writers of my generation, the one immediately following, wouldn’t claim that
“all art aspires to the well-crafted pop song,” even with Tierney’s wry, tongue-in-cheek spirit.
Tierney culls the time capsules of the past for revelations on how we developed–biologically,
politically, spiritually, romantically, and so on–and how we arrived at our cherished assumptions. Yet
at the same time, his time capsule is uniquely his own.
Finally, we may gather the accumulated knowledge of previous generations, collect materials,
and brush the dust off, but there may not be room for all of this in our minds. “Who’s capable of
holding but a fraction,/even less long-term?” Letting go and forgetting seem just as vital as learning
and accumulating. How did we get to this place, the poems seem to ask, even to accuse us; how did
we evolve into what we are? “Everyone has a different take,” Tierney admits, though at the same
time, “We fail together.” For all probing into genetics and physics, the poems suggest that we still do
not grasp the most simple mysteries of time’s arrow, or how to answer the question that bears on all
of us: “what comes next?”
PHOEBE WANG’s work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, Canadian Literature, Descant,
Grain and Diaspora Dialogue’s TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto. She graduated from University of
Toronto’s MA in Creative Writing program, and was recently a finalist of the CBC Poetry Prize.
More of her writing can be found at www.alittleprint.com.
“A LEAN, MEAN READ, OR THEREFORE JUST AVERAGE?”:
A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Probably Inevitable
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto, ON M5S 3J4
2012, $17.95 CDN, $15.99 US, ISBN: 9781552452615
REVIEW BY KEVIN KVAS
Let’s go downtown and talk to the modern kids
They will eat right out of your hand
Using great big words that they don’t understand
—Arcade Fire, “Rococo”
Probably Inevitable, Matthew Tierney’s third book of poetry, or shall we say third rock ballad from the
Sol, is, much like Ryan Reynolds’ litterbox Definitely, Maybe, a rom-com for our post-dotcom dot-dotdot—albeit set in outer-space. Or rather, type-set in the mindset of outer space. The romance
between two humans, however “cocooned” as each is “in [its] sample size of one / by noise
cancelling headphones,” is a synecdoche for humanity’s (b)Romance with the “Impossible ...
ginorm[ity]” (italics his) of Existence and Mr. Big U itself (where yes, the Universe, the Universitysnacked knowledge of the Universe, and human Philosophy powering these poems form a
mathematical identity).
The odyssey begins with the cute “Speed Dating in the Milky Way,” in which a lyrical selfnarrating “I” contemplates, Harold Crick- or Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse-like, the “ovals” of his
“lower limbs” pedalling the product-placed “Schwinn Elliptical” machine in a public bodydisciplining facility, only to spy carnivorously a sexually desirable “you,” whose “metabolism might
be free later / for a gourmet burger and low-watt rom-com.” The odyssey ends with “Cast in Order
of Appearance,” in which they finally (Probably Inevitable-ly?) get to the movie. A filmic image of
“ellipses across the linoleum” complements the “ovals” of the book’s opening, and the adage Love
conquers all is affirmed in as many words for both the “sample size of one” and for humanity en gros
alike: “because she is expendable and you are not” and because “Consciousness makes the
universe.” Thus the Universe is reduced to a Hollywood/math formula. This, for Tierney, is the
modern human impulse: “we / try to contain immensities of scale with a word like ginormous”
because “we’ve lost the means to live restfully / without code.” But if he critiques that impulse to
codify, the form of his book overwhelmingly belies the gesture.
Between the rom-com book-ends and the arbitrary, nondescript numeral assignations of the
book-parts, lie a series of mostly lyrical and/or observational-comedy poems or sketches narrated
mostly by a series of lyrical “I”s probably-inevitably-supposed-to-be-reducible-to the book’s author.
Instead of “violence solv[ing] for x,” reader solves for “I.” It’s hilarious to me when lyricists try to
be discrete/modest about it. More important than what’s told, though, is how it’s told. Someone
somewhere once suggested there are two kinds of writers: writers of good sentences and writers of
good paragraphs, scenes, sections, chapters, books, etc. This dichotomy, while generally false (like all
such “there are two types of” proposals), seems an appropriate tachymeter for Tierney: he is
sententious. Masterfully sententious. “Photons” are “mere minutes on a zip line from the sun”; a
“tomato ’n’ mayo sandwich says whoa / with Wonder Bread lips”; “Questions” are “like Fedex
packages no one’s willing to sign for”; “I am / vexed by one step for a [sic] man / among routine
leaps for species-kind” (“[sic]” in original); “I’ve memorized to a hundred digits / the non-repeating
random walk of π / in hopes that the heat off my CPU / melts the melatonin in my pineal gland.”
You will never kiss your Wonder Bread in the same way again.
But consequently, while sometimes the sentences flow, most times you’re stuck. After
reading a poem, solving its unknown variables, a few sentences stick out like stalactite precipitates,
and that’s all you’re left with: some sweet observations you can’t wait to Tweet (or its face-to-face
equivalent), or to henna onto your Facebook’s “Favourite Quotes” section. Oftentimes, it’s to the
extent that you can imagine the sentences of some of these poems being reordered randomly with
no loss of effect (their arrangement as probably inevitable as any other). Which is, ultimately, what
quotation does (ironic, given the importance the lyric places on authorial, non-random intent).
Is it the influence of social networking, texting, and overall 24-hour news-byte-eating that
makes a lot of poetry nowadays turn out this way? Or does it simply make our lyric-accustomed
minds even more prone to reading it in such a fashion? Probably inevitably, it’s both. Prefacing
Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis once admonished not to “set out expecting ‘good lines’” to pick out and
underline, “such as [one] is accustomed to find in lyrics,” but rather to read on the much larger scale
of the epic and its long, syntactical and imbricated narrative and thematic structures.1 Lewis didn’t
mean that the poem wasn’t quotable—hardly anything isn’t—but that readers accustomed to quick
1
Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005 [1941].
gratification could easily miss the forest for their favourite trees. But there seems little forest to miss
when the author in question, like almost every other poet writing today, has baked up a batch of
two-bit(e) lyrics.2 In the introduction to the second panel of Carnival,3 Steve McCaffery proposes the
neoclassical heroic couplet to be an ancestor of concrete poetry. But perhaps where Carnival was
prescient in its gesture toward a kind of open-source, communitarian D.I.Y. computing philosophy
(as Lori Emerson judges),4 its author was simply premature in his genealogical assessment: perhaps
it’s now Twitter (and the poetry contemporary with it), that in its epigrammatic qualities qualifies as
a closer formal relative of the couplet. By which I mean specifically the closed couplet (as the
neoclassical couplet poems McCaffery is referring to predominantly were), in which each forms a
unit more or less self-contained, both syntactically (the second line of the couplet is end-stopped)
and semantically (the couplet forms a clause or sentence that could stand on its own as a pithy
epigram). I’m suggesting that, despite Tierney’s liberal use of enjambment (and all the other
hallmarks of contemporary unmetered, unrhyming, formally conventional verse), his poetry, and the
large, cheaper-by-the-dozen family of poetry like it, is similarly closed.5 Indeed, perhaps it’s just that
the couplet reflects the nature of English sententious formations in general, but Tierney’s semantic
units are not just sententious like the couplet’s, but they’re also even specifically couplet-like in their
sententiousness: many of his one-liners are, lineally speaking, two-liners, and his occasional rhymes
are almost always couplets or staggered couplets.
In this, Probably Inevitable only lives down to its title in yet another, even more revealing way:
it’s smack-dab on the mean of the bell curve of poetry, both unpopular and popular. Popular poetry,
or rather, popular lyric poetry (i.e., pop music)—distinct from populist unpopular poetry (the nonpop-music lyric—or its recent manifestation, the slam lyric)—loves sententiousness, and therefore
loves the rhyming couplet. The couplet is infamously unpopular within unpopular poetry, and has
been since the eighteenth century (since long before what is now unpopular poetry was unpopular),
but in view of pop music, commercial slogans, and greeting cards—and now, we can add, these
2 To which Lewis is utterly correct to point out that this tendency comes naturally precisely because of the short nature
of lyrics themselves. That is, the lyrical impulse for brevity is mirrored at the poem’s sentence level; it’s like the lyric is
comprised of lyrics-in-miniature. In Probably Inevitable, is this sententiousness perhaps the metaphor to warm the heart of
one’s “sample size of one”? Of course it is: it reflects the same fallacy as that which essentially informs the lyric: that
such a sample size matters.
3 McCaffery, S. Introduction to Carnival: The Second Panel: 1970-75. Toronto: Coach House, 1975.
4 Emerson, L. “A Brief History of Dirty Concrete by Way of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival and Digital D.I.Y.” Open Letter
14.7 (2011): 120-29.
5 This term, as is the case in how it applies to the couplet, is purely descriptive and does not have the negative
connotation “closed-minded”—a natural but faulty association between form and content many people draw when
reading the closed couplets of someone like Alexander Pope.
same (and many more) visual, textual, and aural memes as circulated via Facebook, Twitter, and the
Internet at large—it has in fact been for quite some time the dominant poetic form.6 Probably
Inevitably, while much more learned than what’s to be found in a greeting card or Twitter feed,
exhibits nonetheless a closely related logic in its buzzword-laden sententiousness (even to some
degree, as my rom-com comparison has already hinted at, in the latter word’s connotation of
“didactic or moralizing sentimentalism”), and also in its tendency towards comedy. I called them
“one-liners” precisely for this extra connotation: they often pack, as sententious statements in
general have a tendency of doing, a comedian’s one-two-punchline. Even punchlines themselves are
made the subject of a punchline: “Third visit to / the sleep clinic plays out as punchline … I see /
there’s a polygraph lying on the floor. Ba dum chhh” (ellipsis and emphasis his). It’s rarely laugh-outloud funny, but the same semantic structure is at work here. To further illustrate this, as well as the
sententiousness in general, consider what precedes the above unit:
My favourite T-shirt reads Same Shit,
Different Pile; it says I’m a fun guy
but only reflects the inner me the moment
I start wearing it to bed.
As you can see, there are even two approximately two-line sententious units here that are in turn
synergized into one slightly more super unit, but the structures don’t get more macro-molecular than
that. The first of which even includes an allusion to precisely the kind of pop-cultural catchphrase
that Probably Inevitable’s sententiousness reflects. But what is this passage’s relation to the following
line about the sleep clinic (other than by association, from “bed”)? It’s not immediately evident—
not to say that this in itself defines sententiousness. The point, rather, is that even in the cases where
it is immediately evident, where there is an unmistakable continuity, this evidence is over-clouded by
the more immediate gratifications of flashy sententiousness: that perfect Tweet.
There is continuity within these poems, and a thematic and even (as I’ve suggested) narrative
wholeness for the collection itself. But this wholeness falls limp in comparison to the striking
craftsmanship of its smallest individual units of meaning. Probably Inevitable, in short, is not holistic or
complex: its whole is not more than the sum of its parts. It might as well be thought of as a
reference book; it could’ve been organized as a Bartlett’s-style index, perhaps better suited to Twitter
than to book form. Early readers are probably inevitably already re-publishing it piecemeal as such
6
See Caplan, D., “Why Not the Heroic Couplet?” in New Literary History 30 (1999): 221-238, p. 221.
anyway. Then again, perhaps Tierney’s breaking new ground here. By now, plenty of blogs have
been re-published as books, but has a Twitter feed? Let alone an unpublished Twitter feed?
Could there be a subtitle here? Probably Inevitable: 1001 fun, funny, and punny factoids & truths
stated quickly—before you die of boredom. Sometimes they even verge on being sentimental social- or selfawareness viral ads: “Look at us. We play our parts, manifesting / the normative attention span of a
citified adult”; “You have choices to make. So make them”; “Ages four to thirteen, / [my kids] honk
like geese under a birdless sky”; “Here I am. We are.” The only thing missing is a “Like” button, or a
prefatory Seinfeldian “What’s the deal with” (“ …x,” Tierney would say elliptically). And we’re
supposed to, we’re assumed to—as is the case with satire (another neoclassical model)—agree that
whatever Tierney says is precisely what’s the deal. But in the end, it all seems too good to be true
(even if the line perhaps is true, it seems not to be because Tierney makes it too good). One then
can’t help but wonder if, like Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and like the book’s title itself
(“probably inevitable” is just the same as saying “probably”), and like the committee-written pop
songs and rom-com titles in which such shallow paradoxes also so often pithily reside (e.g., compare
“I hate everything about you / Why do I love you,” “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all,” and the
lyrics of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” with a Tierney phrase like “accidentally, on purpose”; as a
reiteration of his title, it’s no doubt supposed to be poetically significant—just as the exact same
phrase is found in songs by American Idol star David Archuleta, “indie” group The Dresden Dolls,
and country star George Jones)—one can’t help but wonder if what’s here is as truly “deep” as it
seems and as other reviewers are claiming; how much is deep, and how much just a big gaping hole
echoing with buzzwords and media buzz?
The universe itself is such a hole, one might say—Tierney himself, perhaps, albeit in a much
more polished and jargon-tinselled way—and I’d say yes, but your clever Twitterable metaphor does
nothing to improve on it, and tells me nothing more about it. Most pressingly, it also doesn’t explain
why Michael Robbins, the poet whose seal of approval paratextually graces Tierney’s back-cover,
seems to have fallen into precisely such a literary hole. “I have no idea what that means,” he writes
self-ironically, citing first Tierney and then an abstruse Tierney-esque line from Wikipedia, “but
Matthew Tierney does. Let him school you.” This kind of Author-worshipful fetishizing of the Big
Unknowns is nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s nonsense Tierney also prescribes to: “The secret to
writing is that there is no secret,” he writes in a stereotypical writing-advice article; “There’s no
breaking down the parts to figure out how the machine works.” Really? It’s magic? Is this what the
Creative Writing M.(F.)A. teaches? Is this how we safeguard, preserve, and sanctify poetry’s
“deepness”: refusing to understand how/that it works? Is this how the poet keeps his title? The
above comments come ironically in view of what I’ve been suggesting: there’s a very dissectible
“machine” here. Each sentence reads writing-workshop perfect; every word reads like it’s been
tortured into submission in service of the textbook poetic image by a team of workshop critics.
Each sentence is like a PR byte for Lyric Poetry. There’s always a machine, Robbins and Tierney et al.
just aren’t aware of it, or refuse to be. But some of us can see the tricks. Take this almost Gertrude
Stein-like non-sequitur of an if-then construction: “If motion is an illusion stitched together / by
brains too rushed for a proper breakfast, / the home-security racket has recently duped our PTA.”
We end up looking for words in our breakfast cereal while Tierney pulls home-security out of his
hat; we’re surprised by the juxtaposition. It’s a tried-and-true, well-documented linguistic
construction.
But if you refuse to explain, it’s essentially the same as saying that Jim Johnstone’s poetry is
automatically “deeper” when it includes a math-formula epigraph that most poetry readers (not to
mention editors) can only stare at in dumb wonder. You’re treating the Unknown as a class symbol
in the same way one might the Greek epigraph to Eliot’s The Wasteland or the Latin epigraph to
Pope’s “Windsor-Forest.” It’s not enough to say, as poet Ken Babstock does in a book-launch
interview with Tierney, “You’ve got some fantastic titles here,” in reference to the poem
“Paleosubwoofer.” One has to ask the hard questions: what’s fantastic about it? Why? Because it’s a
portmanteau? (See Nick Lantz’s “Portmanterrorism.”) If one actually tries to understand Tierney’s
poetry and does so, whether with the aid of Google or not; if one solves for the xs instead of
concluding x = Unknown = Awesome! (thus essentially merely replacing “God” with “x” in the
same way the Romantic poets replaced “God” with “Nature” and “the sublime,” and that some
Digital Humanists are replacing “God” with “Digital Media”), then one will see that this book is
only as deep as your Twitter status is long; only as deep as the buzzy technobabble in science-fiction
movies is meant not to be meaningful but rather to signify meaningfulness. When all is said and
done—when all is Googled and parsed7—the poems are simply more masterfully sententious lyrics
(sentimental individualism propagandized) with enough basic stuff about physics, math, and
philosophy mixed in competently now and then for the book to benefit from the science-in-poetry
7 A dictionary and/or encyclopedia might seem probably inevitably required for most readers, as reviewers like Michael
Lista suggest. I disagree, and did not experience this need. It’s precisely suggestions like this that also do the same thing
as Michael Robbins in enchanting the book with an aura of the Worshipful Unknowable. It still feels cheating, though,
that it’s not even mentioned that these reference materials are Accessories sold separately. All Tierney includes is a “Notes”
section, sparse and arbitrarily selective in its glosses.
bandwagon that’s been created by a few actually innovative experiments with science and math in
poetry, like those of Christian Bök, Franco Moretti, and The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Where
does Probably Inevitable really differ, then, in a culture full of Probably Inevitables? It doesn’t. It’s not
an outlier: it’s Probably Inevitable.
Could that be the point, perhaps? If it is, it’s a self-defeating, ironic one with which we’re well
familiar: be original by being unoriginal; poeticize commonness and the common man. What I
primarily learned from this book, besides gaining some further confirmation for the modern
condition of sententiousness, is merely some things about the poet as writer of hermetically sealed
Tweets or quirky ad copy. This book isn’t about math, physics, or the universe; it’s about the very
inverse of those things: Tierney’s “you”-in-verse. I’m being sententious, of course. But that’s the
thing: one can be sententious, can have “Seven million septillion stars. / A billion atoms in every
sentence’s full stop …”, while still carrying forth and sustaining something more, something beyond
the sum of its parts. The heroic couplet (I ought to emphasize) did it, the extended conceits of
Donne and Shakespeare’s sonnets did it, long poems do it, and even some conceptual poetry
arguably does it. Probably Inevitable does not do it.
KEVIN KVAS is a graduate student at Concordia University in Montreal.
“WHAT A POEM CAN DO”:
An Interview with Matthew Tierney and Mathew Henderson
BY E MARTIN NOLAN
MATHEW HENDERSON is the author of The Lease (Coach House Books, Fall 2012) and is a recent graduate
of the University of Guelph’s MFA program. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives in Toronto, writes
about the prairies and teaches at Humber College.
MATTHEW TIERNEY is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Hayflick Limit (Coach House
Books), which was shortlisted for a Trillium Book Award. His most recent book, titled Probably Inevitable,
considers the science and philosophy of time. It was released in Fall 2012 from Coach House Books. He lives in
Toronto.
This interview took place on December 20th at The Free Times Café on College Street in Toronto. It
was edited for clarity, and a few follow-up questions and answers were added after the fact.
EMN: Let’s begin with readings. You two went on a little tour to promote your new books. Tell me
about that.
MT: We started in Halifax, then Moncton and Fredericton. It was three readings in four days—a
compressed schedule. It was a good way to get to know someone.
EMN: How many readings have you done outside of that?
MT: I’ve been fairly busy.
MH: I’ve been as busy as I really want to be.
MT: He’s not a big fan, but he’s learning to love the readings.
EMN: What is it you don’t dig about readings?
MH: It’s just that I don’t love the centre-of-attention part of it.
MT: He doesn’t like the sound of his own voice.
MH: I hate the sound of my own voice. I tried to listen to the audio recordings [on the Coach
House web site] and it hurt my heart.
EMN: I found those recordings interesting in terms of the voice of your poems, but I’ll get back to
that.
When you’re on tour, supporting your book, doing a lot of readings from the same book, does your
approach to reading those poems change through that process?
MT: I take readings very seriously. I practice beforehand and I only read poems that I’ve practiced.
Each reading is another attempt to fail in trying to get it right. I hear it a certain way in my head and
I do my best to get that across, but each reading has moments when it doesn’t go as well. That’s why
I tend to read the same poems; I never seem to get them sounding the way they do in my head.
EMN: What kinds of things get switched up?
MT: My wife is an actress, and she often tells me about energy levels, about keeping my energy up.
When you read a poem and you’re not visualizing or imagining what you’re reading, you’re kind of
on auto-pilot—and you hear this all the time in readings, right? When that happens, you get the
sense [the poet] isn’t understanding the meaning of what they’re putting across. Obviously, they’ve
written the poem and know what it’s about, but they can also turn it on and off. So it’s just a
question of being present when I’m reading the poem and not turning off my brain and letting my
mouth do the work.
EMN: Why do you think it is that some poets don’t practice?
MT: I find it incredible.
MH: It is really strange, but I also find that it’s very tempting—as someone who doesn’t love being
up there and doing that—to just check out, to let my mind go here let my mouth use these words.
EMN: To just survive it?
MH: Yes. But it doesn’t take very long to see the difference. I like going to readings, and you can
hear it, exactly like Matthew said, if you’re just reading the poem and you’re not making an effort to
experience the thing you’re doing; it falls completely flat. And you can see the difference in the
people when you’re reading if you’re engaged with the words you’re reading. But it’s tempting to
check out.
MT: And not everyone is comfortable in front of a microphone and a room full of people. But it’s
built into the business of poetry. This is how you sell books: word of mouth. That’s what we do.
Still, some people try to bow out of readings, or try to do as few as possible, but you have to do at
least a couple. You can see some people struggling with that.
MH: Ultimately, if you’re writing something and you want people to be exposed to it—and I assume
anyone writing does (even book sales aside)—it’s the best chance for people to hear what you’ve
written. It’s a great opportunity.
EMN [to MH]: So in the course of reading from The Lease, did you note any adjustments you made
in how you read?
MH: A few things. I’ve become more comfortable, just from practice. Other things: you can start to
tailor poems based on the way people have reacted. You learn when to have a pause, when not to
have a pause, and it changes the way you think of certain poems. Matthew [Tierney] probably put
more thought into what poems to read, just from experience, while I was figuring that out as I went.
MT: And that changes with the room, too. The room we did in Moncton was really loud and
raucous—the night was half-music and half-poetry reading, and people were drinking—so you read
those ones that are little bit more … well, humour goes over well in those types of situations.
Whereas, if you get into a quiet library setting, people aren’t as comfortable laughing out loud, but
you get some really earnest listeners, so that’s when you want to read the quiet pieces.
MH: And conversation goes over well too, right? The moments between [poems]; that’s another
thing I’ve gotten better with. It’s good being honest, like “I’m really awkward right now, but it’s
fine.”
EMN: That’s a bit of an art form in itself. You don’t want to just go right into the poem, but you
don’t want to do too much. I’m thinking of David McGimpsey, who does it well.
MT: Well, he’s a stand-up comic, so it’s not fair to compare him to anyone. But it is true that you
have to imagine hearing this poem for the first time, because [when listening] you don’t have a
chance to go back and pick up something you missed. I always try to think of what they need to
know, and can hang their hat on, in case they get lost—because everybody zones out sometimes and
it’s hard to keep your mind that focused.
EMN: You brought up stand-up comedy. Do you find any affinity between the reading and standup? In both cases, you’re up there alone, just speaking.
MT: I think there’s a danger to trying to be the stand-up comic because those are the poems you get
the most reaction from. A laugh is the most rewarding thing you can get because it’s immediate
feedback, and you hunger for that after a while. Other than that, you have to carry the whole energy
of the performance yourself, like a stand-up comic, whereas in theatre—I spent some time acting—
it’s so much easier when there’s another person on stage. The energy immediately goes up, you’re
not the focus anymore, and the dialogue can carry you. But monologues are tough.
EMN [to MT]: This reminds me of your readings I’ve heard lately: at Pivot and at The Puritan’s Black
Thursday event, which was different.
MT: How so?
EMN: More energy, more boisterous; you were following a lot of hilarity. At Pivot, it wasn’t a library
crowd—
MT: No, but people were listening. It was a smaller crowd, and sometimes it’s just the size of the
crowd. I mean, if you’re reading to two or three people—
MH: Which sometimes happens. The other night I did a reading at a much smaller place, and you
know I was talking to the guy making coffee in the corner, and there’s a guy right there ordering a
coffee.
MT: Sometimes it’s the level of sobriety, too. I had had a few [at Black Thursday], in which case
you’re a little looser.
EMN: On a related topic, I’ve read it argued that poetry has become a written form. Is poetry a
primarily spoken or written medium? Is there a difference?
MT: Well, the lyric poem is sound and sense, that’s what it is. When you’re reading or writing a lyric
poem, even if it’s not spoken, you’re hearing an internal voice; you’re picking up on sounds as they
flow through the poem. If you give voice to that poem by reading it aloud, that’s just one instance of
the poem, one example of how this poem can be read. But the blueprint is there for anyone to read
it aloud, and to still hear a voice.
EMN [to MH]: Your poems read as speeches, like they ask to be read aloud, so what’s the balance
for you?
MH: I don’t know anyone who loves poetry and doesn’t read it out loud. When you’re sitting with a
book you love, you pause and you read a few of those poems out loud. So both [the poem as written
medium and spoken medium] exist, but that being said, I would never want to get an audio book of
poems without access to the written words.
I don’t think I need to make a distinction between the two, but for me it is an incredibly oral [thing].
When I’m writing, it’s a coming together of speaking and writing: writing some, speaking them out,
trying to figure out what comes next.
MT [to MH]: In your book, too, you adopt voices, characters, personalities. You don’t do it all the
time, but there are those that stand out, that are speech—
MH: There are so many times [when], writing, I think that I’m getting somewhere. Then I read it out
loud and realize, “you’re so full of shit, this is you imitating someone, it’s not even remotely how this
person sounds, or how this thing should be.” And that’s an ear thing.
EMN: That brings us back to your [recorded poems]. When I listened to them, I heard a distinct
accent, a familiarity with the voice of the poem. The voice on the page was already strong, but the
recording added texture.
MH: I would hope that’s there. That discomfort with my voice is just insecurity. If I’m writing
something, and I want a friend to give feedback, I’ll give them the paper, but I’ll read it for them
too.
EMN [to MT]: With yours, hearing them read aloud reveals more, like interior rhymes I didn’t hear
before. How much do you play to that oral quality? Do you have to read it back before you can hear
those aural qualities?
MT: There’s something I picked up from Jeremy Dodds. I had done it before, casually: reading a
poem out[loud] while I was writing. But he actually records it and hears himself, and that became a
part of the process for me for this book, to record it on the laptop: to close my eyes and hear where
the energy sags and to see where the opportunities are for taking the poem in different directions. So
when I read it [out loud], I guess that’s when I start duplicating the writing process [by listening back
to the recording]. When you write, it’s almost like you’re juggling both the sound and the sense.
You’re tying to keep the sound in your head, like the consonance and assonance you’ve [captured]
so far, and you’re trying to keep that in the air while trying to further the meaning of the poem.
Hopefully, at the end when you have the poem, it traces a line for you that you’re maybe not even
aware of, just because you kept both balls in play.
EMN: Given that patterning you’ve described there, what kind of attention do you both pay to
prosody? Do you scan your poems?
MH: Sometimes. It will depend. For a while I was scanning too much and it was eliminating some of
the voice. I have a real problem with order sometime, and I want everything lined up. The poems in
this book should not necessarily line up in a neat order, particularly the ones in somebody else’s
voice, because that’s not how it goes. But yeah, I would break them down, and just like when you’re
[MT] listening to them, when I’m breaking them down it can show me those gaps and opportunities,
places where I haven’t done what I should’ve been doing but can’t notice. It can show you the scars
of editing.
EMN: How much of that is purposely creating rhythm and how much of it is finding the rhythm
that was already there?
MT: [laughing] That’s the million-dollar question: Does form come before sense? They find each
other. This is something I ask other poets: when you’re first writing the poem, how do you find the
form for what you’re trying to say. There’s that window of opportunity before it solidifies—
MH: And then your path is set.
MT: And we’ve all had that experience with a poem that isn’t working and we try to shove it into
some form, like “maybe this will work as couplets,” and you just can’t do it. There’s a point of no
return in each poem, where the form gets harder and harder to alter.
MH: There’s a great Robert Hass article on that [“One Body: Some Notes of Form”]. It was after
reading that that I started to really, really break things down. Now I think every choice limits the
next choice. Every step that you take, every word that you choose, will determine slightly more what
the next word needs to be or must be. The big question—what comes first?—I don’t know. For me,
it’s more about going back and drawing out, emphasizing the things that are there, rather than
beginning with a notion of what things should be.
MT: [Dean Young] once said the form is a sort of advanced criticism of the poem. It draws limits on
what’s acceptable. So the quicker you get to the form, the quicker you take away those wonderful
moments when something unexpected happens. At the same time, you can’t write completely
without any scaffolding for the lines. It’s a constant struggle.
EMN [to MH]: What ends up being the controlling mechanism, then? Is it starting, seeing what
comes out and asking, “What is this trying to be?” With your stuff, you say you break it down, but it
also has to be off-the-cuff.
MT: It has to seem like it comes off the cuff.
EMN: Right, so do you [MH] think that you edited some of that out in your quest for order?
MH: Yeah. There’s this moment when you say, “maybe I should try this?” Inevitably, I will try to
take everything I do too far, and I have to pull myself back. There were a few points where I
noticed: “you’ve gone a bit too far with this, you’ve lost track of something else, you’ve lost track of
the thing that you loved, which is the words and the meaning—”
MT: You want control, but if you have too much you lose the spark of the poem. So you have to
bring it back, take more risks. But then if you risk too much you have no control of the poem.
You’re always working with the illusion of control, clinging to it for dear life.
EMN: Based on my reading, I’d say both of these books are highly stressed, but to different effects.
With MH, I’d say it has a propulsive effect, whereas with MT it slows the reader down. Do you
think about that when breaking down the prosody: what effect it has on the reading pace? Also, how
do you control speed in a poem? What is speed in a poem? This is something I’ve struggled with.
MH: I’m always rushing toward an ending. It’s something Kevin [Connolly] and I worked on. I’m
constantly getting to the end and then doing this “and here’s the ending” thing. Because of that
tendency, there’s that rush, that propulsion forward, as I’m trying to move, move, move—then
there’s a sudden stop. Things often pivot at the ending of the poems. The way that I do that [create
the forward momentum]—and this [observation] is in retrospect—is I repeat constantly. I will have:
“and…, and…, and…, and…”
EMN: On that repetition: you quote Phillip Levine’s “What Work Is.” That and “Belle Isle 1949”
are moments when you can hear Whitman, especially with the repetition. I wonder why that keeps
coming back.
MT: It’s Biblical.
EMN: But also plain spoken, natural, I think—
MT: The incantatory, the “and this, and this,” is rhythmic; it’s standing at the pulpit.
MH: It’s a sort of authoritative, common voice that’s telling you what’s happening—“this happens,
then this happens,” like that.
EMN: Do you see that as tied to the place, the people, you’re describing?
MH: For varying reasons it would show up in different poems. If it’s a poem about someone’s dayto-day, then yeah, it’s coming from [his or her] voice patterns—I’m hoping that I’m doing that well.
But in one where I’m making big statements, like “all the prairie’s a swimming pool,” where I’m
making declarations, it’s coming from that pulpit voice, like “let me tell you what this world is.”
MT [to MH]: At the same time, you undercut it with a lot of that inward voice; you have those
moments, but you make those uncertain. You have a line at the end of the book where you say
something like “I’m going to lie about all these men,” which casts a shadow on everything you just
read. It plays with the whole idea of honesty, of being honest to someone else’s voice or being
honest to your own voice. Did you struggle with that?
MH: Yes. That’s why that poem [“Sunday”] is there. That’s probably the last one that was written
and it’s the last one in the book. It’s like, “ah, I’m such a fucker and I need to acknowledge that a
bit.”
MT: But there’s also that mythopoeic exaggeration of the young man but also of the male culture as
well, which you tap into quite successfully. And, necessary to understanding these guys is knowing
that they exaggerate their own place in the world.
MH: That was one of the difficulties of writing this: trying at once to say, “let me come clean
because I’m stretching this a bit,” but that doesn’t mean everything is actually a lie. I’m lying but I’m
not lying.
MT: There’s a great line [from “Dan”] about a guy with a cowboy hat, dancing, and he looks like he
can take care of himself: “and you know that if a man were to snatch his hat/ playful like or angry,
he’d beat him right to fucking death.” I read that and went, “oh, OK.” But then: he’s not a
murderer, and I don’t believe you believe he’s capable of murder, yet that exaggeration is necessary
to understand who he is. He has to believe himself, or at least put forth that persona of someone
who’s tough enough to be able to do that. We’re in a weird mind here; I don’t believe it, but I know
what you’re trying to say.
MH: It’s heartening to see you catch those things. Especially with a first book.
EMN: We’ll come back to first books, but on the pulpit-populist language, I’ve read that when you
read these southern novels where uneducated labourers are using some form of high eloquence, it’s
because all they read or heard was the King James Bible. And who is it the pulpit was talking to but
working people? So it’s funny, but maybe not surprising that the pulpit and the people would have
the same propensity for grandiosity.
[to MH]: There’s one poem where you flirt with romance—“does the farm girl hear this, over there/
in the tractor cab? Does she know it’s you?”—but then it ends, “But your hands, they’re already in
an X above your head/ when you remember the sign for shut the fucking well.” So there’s that double
level.
MT: He’s got the idea that the language is different. The language of “shut the fucking well” is to get
something done. You only speak when you need to and you speak because some shit is going to go
down, so you have to communicate exactly what to do. But then the narrator of a lot of these poems
wants to look at language differently. There’s another poem [“Todd”] where there’s a guy trying to
hold gas in his hand, and he’s looking for the colour of it. There’s an unbridgeable gap between the
metaphor of the narrator[’s description] and the guy looking for the [actual] stuff of the Earth. He
could not find it there; it’s a sad moment.
EMN: And he seemed like one of the good guys, too. [To MH:] To finish the Levine comparison.
His speaker is telling the “you” of “What Work Is” that “you don’t know what work is.” The Lease
seems different. It seems the “you” knows what work is, but also feels outside of it. Did you
viscerally feel that in-between-ness?
MH: In a lot of cases, these poems are me asking myself questions and trying to answer as truthfully
as I can. Truthfully in the sense that sometimes the real version of things is the stretched one; it’s the
experience instead of the reality. So, that “you” who sits in between is a product of interrogating
different aspects of personality, different stages of understanding. It’s a product of having to confess
to yourself. I guess that the version of me who was on his sixtieth or seventieth straight day of work
knew about work or labour or life in a different way than I do now, and I wanted both voices.
EMN [to MT]: To get back to that idea of speed, let me give two analogies. Reading a Ken Babstock
poem, a recent one, is like being battered in a storm; you read the poem and feel that, then go back
and try to figure out what battered you. A recent Dionne Brand poem is like getting on a
rollercoaster ride, so you feel the whoossh, then go back and see what you sped past. With your stuff,
it was like I was looking at a mosaic too closely at first, that it seemed to be straight, but then wasn’t.
Once I slowed down, I found that I could follow better, see the wider picture. [To MH:] Did you
find that, too?
MH: At times Matthew controls speed not necessarily through rhythm but through language and
syntax. While reading, or hearing, there are these moments where I think I’m following along, like
“this is a normal sentence,” but then I realized there’s been a switch, and that I’m now on to the
next sentence. I need to pause for a moment to know exactly what’s been happening. So it’s the
language itself that dictates the pace you should be going at.
MT: There’s a Dean Young line, from “Dear Writer,” and I had this pinned up to my wall for a long
time: “I’d rather you lose me/ than cause delays telling me the way.” [to MH] I think that speaks to
reading a sentence and you suddenly find yourself in a place where you didn’t expect to be. I didn’t
want to have signposts up, like “now this is the next section”—
MH: And you shouldn’t.
MT: But I deliberately planned those surfaces between the associative leaps. I wanted it to be so that
you got to the end and went, “whoa, wait, I’m at the end?” A lot of the poems stop rather than end.
MH: There are poems in [Probably Inevitable] where I get to the end and I say, “that really wraps this
up.” Then: “wait, what is this wrapping up?” Then you go back and find that it’s wrapping up this
bit, and this bit, and this bit. You do it well in [“Carbon Monoxide, Alka Seltzer and the Slow Pitch
of Acceptance”].
EMN: And, when I slowed down my reading [of Probably Inevitable], I heard things like a threesyllable word at the start of this line, then one a few down, and another, and they really echo off
each other if you hear every word fully.
MT: I don’t—and I’m not sure anyone does—write poems so they only [need to] be read once. I’d
like you to get to the end of the poem and go, “okay, I’ll have to read this again.” But to follow on
your point [on musicality], I hesitate to say that’s conscious. I’m glad that it happens but I’m not
always sure how it happens. I’m conscious of keeping that possible, but I’m not tying bows on
poems.
EMN: But do you ever recognize them—do you notice a three-syllable word here, then here, then
say, “let’s make one happen here to reinforce that echo”?
MT: Yeah, but maybe not at that level of detail. Certainly, when you edit and you get other editors,
other voices in, you start to recognize more things.
EMN [to MT]: In “Rising Action, then Falling,” you mention fusion jazz, which is an imprecise
label, but let’s say it is marked by a building and unbuilding of melodic structure, by a kind of
constant turning that is reminiscent of your book's. Do you see that connection? Do you think in a
way of starting a thought, an eloquence, then turning away, and in that creating a more complex
music and semantic pattern?
Take the opening lines of "From the Outside In": they bring out the deceptive density of these
poems:
Undone funeral parlour, floral
papered walls in colours clinically proven
to sooth, I’m moved to watch my second hand
sock-hop ahead. Galileo lit on the pendulum clock…
So many “o” and “l” sounds there, the “our” echo in the first two lines, the echo of “proven,
“sooth” and “moved,” then the sucker punch of “sock-hop” and “lit.”
These phrases seem everyday, but if you slow down, if you walk on them as you would on steppingstones, they reveal more. There's some level of deception there. Is that related to the breaking of the
melody, of the constant turning?
MT: Ugh, jazz. I spent my late teens pretending to like jazz. Some solid, irrecoverable years.
The musicality of the poem is, I hope, fairly whole. But if you’re saying there’s a building and
unbuilding of ideas, I can buy that, I take your point. The “leaps” or “turns”—those escapes from
linearity—are cast in relief against the whole notes, so to speak, of those echoes that spiral through
the poem. If there’s any deception going on, it’s on the level of seduction: I want you to want to
read it again.
EMN: Let’s move on from the individual poem to the sequence or book. You both have fairly
unified books, although yours [MT] is less unified by theme than it is by a way of looking at the
world.
[To MH]: The Lease is focused on your time working in the oil fields, in Alberta. How did you come
to focus on that as your subject matter?
MH: Well, my other stuff was crap. I moved [to Toronto] for the MFA [at Guelph-Humber] and I
didn’t know a single person in Ontario. I was living in North Etobicoke in this tiny basement
apartment with ceilings about a foot taller than I was, and I was suddenly in a workshop with
Dionne Brand, who was intimidating as hell, despite her kindness.
I was miserable and happy all at once. For workshop, I just kept writing all this crap. It’d be the day
before workshop, and I’d have to write a poem. Here I am in this place, I don’t know where I am—
absolute shit poems. Then near the end, I was starting to get more comfortable—or more
uncomfortable?—and I decided to try to write some oil field poems, because everyone seemed to be
interested—for the first time ever—that I had worked there. No one cares in PEI [where MH is
originally from]. So I wrote a couple, and people said, “do more of those.” So then I did, and
eventually I became more interested and self-propelled.
EMN: When you were working in the fields, were you already writing, or thinking in that mode?
Were you like the speaker [James, or the narrator], thinking on his two levels? There’s a mention of a
Seamus Heaney book.
MH: At times. That Heaney book was really there and so were other books, but I wasn’t writing
much. A lot of that’s a practical thing. You’re working sixteen-hour days; there’s not a lot of time for
writing.
MT: But when you were doing it, were you imagining, “this is something I could possibly write
about”?
MH: 90 percent of the time all I was thinking about was “hurry up and leave this place.” That’s the
honest truth: I was not enjoying myself. I felt like—penance is not the right word, but I felt like it
was something I needed to do, then I’ll go back to my life. It wasn’t until I reflected on it that
realized that experience had been changing me, and that while I was there, I had been thinking about
and looking at the place and the people around me—and was changed because of it.
EMN: In “What You Do,” you write, “as if he could leak/ into you with words, as if they held any
power here.” Is that your description of where words were at that point for you?
MH: It’s a cyclical thing. There was not a whole lot of power to the words, but you’ve got the
narrator who thinks there is power there, who’s carrying around a book of Heaney in his rig bag. At
the same time, you now have this person writing, who clearly believes words have power, no matter
where they are. It’s the conflict in that that became interesting to me.
EMN: There’s a contradiction in that, too. There’s your concept of what language is—which you
had there, and especially in looking back—but then there’s also the fact that the narrator was afraid
the words would leak into him; there’s the fear that the workers’ banter would infect him, making
him as crude as this person [“James,” who “wants to tour Thailand. He’s excited by the cheap sex/
the freedom from condoms and lube …”], which implies a power to those words.
MH: Yes, the very acknowledgment of that means it can happen. But the narrator of [The Lease] is
deeply flawed.
MT: He’s looking at these models of maleness, and words are seen as something weak. [He’s
thinking,] what is it to be a man? Is it to shun the idea of expression?
MH: There are attempts [at expression], but it’s “as if” it helps.
EMN: Or is it just that words are being put to a different purpose? The banter makes up some of
the best parts of [The Lease]. They’re almost found poems, so there is something there.
MT: There’s some playful language there.
MH: Sure.
EMN: When you were still in the fields, did you get the sense there was a grand beauty about the
place?
MH: I can’t imagine a person who can deny it. There are moments at two in the morning and you’re
in the field and all you can see are single flare stacks. They’re thirty feet high, and that’s all you can
see, and you can hear all the animals around you, and the sky is full—you can’t deny it.
MT: Did you ever have a sense of writing against what we think of as nature poems?
EMN: I have seen this mentioned as a prairie book.
MH: If you’re writing poetry in Canada, you’re aware, even if it’s false, of the “Oh, the great river…”
So I was aware of that, and it worried me a bit—that I’d accidentally fall into that—but I worried
that purposely writing against it would be no better. So I just tried to be as genuine as I could, to just
write what was around me.
MT: There’s also no condemnation of the process, of the oil fields itself. There’s no editorializing. It
must have been tempting, especially in retrospect.
MH: It was important for me [not to editorialize]. How hypocritical would that be? I’d be there
making money, leave, then three months later bring on the criticism? [When] the BP spill happened
in the Gulf, I was thinking, “don’t do that, don’t go near that.”
EMN: Have you gotten any criticism for that yet? Oil is such a fraught political topic, with people
on both sides very passionate, but what’s lost in that seems to be what it’s actually like there.
MT: What work is.
MH: I’m much more concerned with the day-to-day and the people, and the book is too, than the
grand layout of the thing. The other thing is that I tell people I worked in the oil fields, and they say,
“oh, the Oil Sands?” “No, not really, I don’t know anything about the oil sands, nothing more than
you do.”
EMN: One more thing on that: why “you” instead of “I”? You mention you were in Toronto,
writing about being out there, so was that a way of distancing yourself from that experience?
MH: The opposite. In my undergrad I did a lot of distancing, like “I’m going to college, I’m learning
things—"
MT: Book learning—
MH: I thought, “I’m going to leave this place and these guys who were crude and rough, who
seemed like assholes.” But instead of distancing, I thought, “that was a very real thing you were
doing, and these guys aren’t what you thought they were.” I’m hoping to God that it’s not
judgmental.
A few things [about the second person]: I wanted to implicate the reader, because I feel very guilty
about a lot of things, as a writer, so I wanted to bring other people into that. For me, poetry is about
sharing feeling, so if I feel something—if I feel sick to my stomach—I want [people] to have to feel
that too, and I mean that in the nicest, most open way possible.
EMN: Did you play around with an “I” instead?
MH: There was a bunch of “I”s in there. For the most part, the places where "I" showed up were
much weaker.
EMN: So the "you" is not always yourself? Is it a seeing eye?
MH: It’s both. When you’re reading “you,” it’s usually pretty clear that it’s me, but I want you to
imagine it’s you.
MT: The poems are talking back, into the past. So you’re talking to your younger self, which is
“you.”
EMN: Have you heard anything about The Lease from any of the people you worked with in the oil
fields?
MH: No, I haven’t, but I’m still in touch with a couple of people. I’m doing my best to be honest in
writing these poems, and if you read them you can tell a lot of those guys are picking up books of
poetry because they think they might show up in them, and a lot of them will never know that it
exists. I’d be eager to see what they think; that’d be great.
EMN: I ask partially because I was wondering if this was one of those mythical poetry collections
that you don’t have to be a poetry head to read.
MH: Just before I got here someone posted on my wall, another writer and a bookseller, that he just
sold two to his landlord, because the landlord’s two kids work on rigs.
MT: Someone in Moncton [where MT and MH read together] said “it’d be perfect for my brother,
who’s working out west.”
MH: So maybe—but I’m putting myself back in the field, and I’m thinking, “they might get the
book, but they’re not going to read it.” That’s okay.
EMN: You might just get a good ribbing for it.
MH: That’s partly why a lot of them don’t know: they’re not the first people in my life whom I’d get
a “good for you” from. More, “why’d you do that?”
EMN: Now you’re moving on from this book, and away from the experience that prompted it.
Given the book was so focused, I imagine you were deep in that headspace. What’s it been like
extracting yourself, especially because you have to go back into it to do readings and so forth?
MH: It’s strange. I took six months off between the last stage of editing and when the readings
started. [When I] picked it back up, it was a bit new again.
MT: Physically as well as mentally, you moved away to a new city; you have none of the constant
reminders.
MH: Yeah. It’s so far away—the kind of far away that I don’t think I could have waited another year
and put it together.
MT: It would’ve been different. You could’ve done it, but it would have been different. The longer
you wait with this kind of book, the more it morphs into something different.
MH: I’ve been messing around with a little writing since, and you can tell that I’ve picked up certain
tendencies. It’s a bit of a stretch, but we were talking about how in a poem each word that you write
limits the amount of options you have as you go and there comes a point where it’s fully made.
Maybe it could be that way with books as well, or poems. So maybe with this book, I’ve adopted
things that will be around for a long time. But my girlfriend promises me I’m not writing the exact
same poems. Hopefully I’m not.
EMN: So are you in the womb of another book then?
MH: Pre-womb.
EMN: Back of the Chevy?
MT: Fumbling with the condom.
MH: And it’s going to break.
EMN [to MT]: We were talking about what we do after a first book.
MT: Write a second one.
EMN: Well, yeah. But how? It was five years between your first and second. Your first one is similar
in some ways to The Lease, pretty personal, the “I” is prominent, or the “me” or the “me and
Vaughan,” etc. Tell me about being in that space, then going out into a more contextual space with
the The Hayflick Limit, where you’re moving from the firsthand experience to more abstraction,
philosophy, science. When I first read the first one [Full Speed Through the Morning Dark], I thought it
seemed like a different poet. Then I read through the last two and I could see the connection. Yet,
there is a distance traveled between the first and the next two books.
MT: I think it was a question of growing up as a poet. A question of reading habits. A question of
what I thought poetry should do vs. what it could do.
EMN: Should do vs. could do: explain that.
MT: The first book is written toward what I thought a poem should be. It was based on my reading
experience at that time, that a poem has to do these certain things, and I’m going to manipulate my
writing into that mould. I think any success that I ended up having [with Hayflick] was due to just
being myself, not worrying about hitting certain notes, but following what’s in my head. You
mention ‘conceptual’ or ‘abstraction’, and that’s more who I am than the person in the first book.
It’s always hard to look back on the first book, because that’s the best I could do at the time, and
that’s what I thought a poem should do at the time. There’s success in that, and there’s failure—
stuff I wouldn’t want to look at now—but there’s also always a line you can trace from the first to
the second book. You find the seed of the next book in a few of the poems from the first. I like that
you can say, “I read it, and it didn’t sound like the same person, but then I went back and said, ‘well,
wait.’” Because you can never not be yourself.
EMN: The “I” that comes up in Probably Inevitable is older—
MT: [Laughing] It’s a different “I.” This “I” is not me; it’s personas, it’s different people. The
distance between the “I” in the first one and the person who went through those travels is very, very
close. [In that case,] there’s always [rewriting in] hindsight, where you shift things around, but this
new one is very, very different.
EMN: But how much of that just has to do with what was happening in your life? For Full Speed
Through the Morning Dark, you were travelling, finding things worthy to write about. Did you then
come to Toronto and find you had to seek that out in an intellectual way?
MT: Well, moving from an active to an inactive life, where you spend a lot of time sitting around in
coffee shops—I’m not sure how to trace the evolution of that. Your environment affects your
poems, but it’s also how you look at that environment. When I was travelling, I was looking at [my
environment] as something that was worthy of being poetic. This is a part of where I think the flaw
was in that book: I was seeking the material instead of letting it come to me.
MH: You were looking for what a poem should be or should do.
MT: Yeah, and it’s easy to hang your hat on experiences this way: it was an interesting experience;
therefore, it will be an interesting poem. What happens then is your expression of the experience
equals your expression of the poem. That isn’t always enough to make it a good poem, but
sometimes it is.
EMN: So now you’re more focused on what a poem can do, with more elements, more possibility.
MT: Yeah, but I don’t want to say there’s something wrong about—obviously, Mat [H] has written a
beautiful book here—
MH: But I’m going to go through this too, of looking back and saying, “what on Earth is that?”
MT: Yeah, and people often start off that way, in any genre. The first book, first novel, is often
semi-autobiographical, because it’s tough to make that first step.
EMN: Didn’t Joyce say something about that, that you need to write your autobiography first? I
think he just kept doing it, but that’s another topic.
MT: It’s also that moment, I think in your mid-to-late twenties. It’s those experiences where you
create the myth of yourself. This is the story of yourself that you’re going to tell yourself over and
over and it’s going to tell who you are. It’s very, very powerful; where you are and what you’re doing
at that time becomes very important. Maybe that’s what Joyce meant.
EMN: Neither Full Speed Through the Morning Dark or The Lease contain much humour, although
neither is particularly elevated either. There’s more in Hayflick and Probably Inevitable. How do you
approach humour in your poems, and what is the function of humour in poetry? Is humour
something included in what a poem can be, but often excluded from ideas of what it should be?
MT: I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t enjoy laughing. That said, humour is not something you
can fake. You can’t be funnier in your poems any more than you can resolve to be funnier in the
New Year.
What can happen, though, is that you filter out any natural inclinations because it doesn’t jive tonally
with what you’re going for. It isn’t surprising that this happens— controlling tone in a poem is the
author’s prerogative. But if it happens all the time, then, yes, you are in effect saying, “This is what I
think poetry should be. It should be ‘brows furrowed.’ ”
When you laugh, though, reading a poem—at that moment of the laugh your critical defenses are
down and you’re open to something new. You’re up for the next challenge. What poet wouldn’t
want a reader in this frame of mind?
MH: I write a lot of drafts with humour in them, but I don’t really turn to poetry to express humour,
so those drafts are usually abandoned. That being said, I like reading poems with some laugh to
them, and writing humour is as legitimate a reason to turn to writing or reading poetry as anything
else. The function of humour changes from poem to poem, but I don’t think it necessarily needs to
serve any purpose beyond being funny. A lot of the time, though, people consider poetry
“humorous poetry” because it’s funnier than other poetry, not because it’s actually funny. Gabe
Foreman’s A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People is actually funny.
EMN: Let’s turn to the form of the book-as-a-whole. [To MH] You imagine you’ll only ever work in
larger themes, in books-as-a-whole.
MH: I’m an infant with this. Writing is still so new, and I could change, could totally spin around on
a dime tomorrow. But I’m naturally obsessive, so I think I’ll work with constant themes and ideas
for a while.
MT: Some people dislike book-length projects in favour of “just write some poems and put ’em
together.” I think it comes down to how your mind works. I tend to get obsessive about things, or
I’ll read about certain areas of the world or thought, and I constantly go back to that. The poems
then end up taking that texture and that tone. And I tend to write in spurts as well, so the poems are
butting up [against] each other, are close. They then tend to fall into that book-length thing.
EMN: How did Probably Inevitable come together?
MT: It was about hearing this way of thinking—this accelerated, disjunctive, aggressive way of
thinking. It’s completely unrealistic. I wanted to immerse myself in this kind of hyper-time, and see
what would come of that. So I wrote the poems in batches, and very quickly. This is where the unity
comes from, probably. But I feel disingenuous, because there are poems in there that are one-offs. I
feel odd sometimes because I feel like I’m talking about a novel—which has a plot that ties it
together—but I’m not, I’m talking about a collection of poems, even though they all kind of go in
the same direction.
But while I did shift gears, it takes four or five years to write these things. You can’t be concentrated
that much.
MH: That’s obsession taken to the extreme. [To MT]: When you’re putting the poems together, how
did you figure out the ordering? Did you try to craft some kind of arc through things?
MT: Well, like I said I wrote these poems in bunches, and they fell into rhythms or textures. I didn’t
want to lump those together, so you’d get the same kind of poem for 20 pages then shift. So I was
trying to extract as much variety from my work as I could. I don’t want to say I just threw them on
the floor—I spent a lot of time trying to get how the poems speak to each other. Like, when you
come off a poem, will it remind you of something you’ve read—
MH: You want to defy this: “am I going to do damage by placing these two too close together?”
MT: Yeah, if they’re too close in their concerns, they might need breathing space. Even something
as mundane as length [might matter]. Sequencing is always tough. It’s always the last thing you do,
and there’s no right answer.
EMN: On that, let’s look at the construction of “The Stratospheric Streak My Green Filament.”
How do you write the small piece, while keeping the context of the sequence in mind, at the end, in
the sequencing part, or even when you’re writing?
MT: I think it’s dangerous to try to do that when you’re writing.
EMN: So did you write those poems, then say, “oh, they go together? ”
MT: No, those were written to hang together, even if each one is a separate instance. But if you’re
trying to write for something, to fill a gap, then the poem isn’t going to happen. You have to write
past the finish line, and then eliminate the pieces that didn’t work.
EMN: In your composing of “The Stratospheric Streak My Green Filament,” what was it that those
separate poems were meant to “hang” on?
MT: Well, there are a few points in each poem that had to echo back. There’s a few repeated lines,
there’s the idea of centre/not centre, the refrain “where am I now?”, the found lines from Julian
Barbour’s book. Those are the touch points. And I knew the poems had to jump around in time. So
I had soft constraints for them, and those alone are what make it hang. I could conceive of a book
where those poems were spread throughout, but I thought they were better together.
EMN [For MT]: how does that idea of centre/no-centre relate to how the poems work; that is, is
the questionable nature of the centre related to these poems’ inability to stay focused, to stay on one
track? Did the de-centred content demand a de-centred prosody/argument?
MT: Some of that was attributable to Barbour, who talks about the illusory nature of history as
linear, a one-way track, as it were. Pushing off from his ideas of time, I imagined a centrifugal force
flinging these poems, or instances, to the periphery. And yet they still run through a single
perspective, a subjectivity, which asserts an opposite force, a centripetal one. It’s very disco ball.
EMN [to MH]: How much sequencing did you do with The Lease?
MH: Likewise, much of this came out in piles; then I was ditching things later. Now with this, there
was a time period in my mind of when these things happen, a flow to that, and other concerns—I
don’t want to put a poem first about a thing when nobody knows what it is. I want to explain to the
reader what it is first, without being expository, boring, or doing it for a purpose. I was writing
without thinking about it, hoping a lot of that got shaded in so I could take advantage of it. For the
most part it did, but not having the experience that [MT] had, not knowing to say, “you can’t sit
down to write a poem to shade in a gap,” I did do that a bit. And those poems that I did try to shade
in: nothing, doesn’t work. Someone can do it, I’m sure; I can’t.
There was a point when the book was half done, or three-quarters done, and I sat down and said,
“these are the things that need to get filled in to reach my idea of what this [book] should cover.”
Then each time I said, “this person will get a portrait poem” or “this activity will get a poem”… a
different poem came out. It wasn’t that they always failed, it was that I sat down to write a portrait
poem about John, but it became something else. It wasn’t about John, or anything else, so I made
what I could out of it.
EMN: You both have very specific, and deeply mined, subject matter. Did you ever worry about
that overwhelming the poems themselves? Michael Lista, in The National Post, credits you [MT]—and
discredits others for the opposite—for not allowing the science to overcome the poetry. I agree, but
were you ever worried about that?
MT: Oh yeah. But, as you said, I hoped it wasn’t about [science] but a way of thinking. Even though,
when you’re talking about the book, you have to talk about the subject matter, that it’s about “time.”
But in my mind, it really isn’t. That’s the vehicle I use to get into a mode of thinking, of experiencing
the world.
The problem is: when you talk about things that are unfamiliar to the imagined reader, you worry
about that becoming a hindrance—or becoming the focus. When people talk about my poems as
being about science, it’s because the information there is new to them and that becomes the focus. I
wonder if Lista is talking about when you foreground interesting facts, it becomes about the facts,
not the poem. I’m constantly working toward getting away from that. I want the science to inform
the poems, but I don’t want them to be the poem. The poem, for me, is the persona speaking it.
Does that make sense?
MH: Yeah. The Lease all takes place in the oil field, in the prairie. That’s just the setting.
MT: But you don’t take time to explain what fracking is.
MH: No. Because that’s not a poem. This is the advice that I constantly get: just write those words,
let them be confusing. The practical part comes much later, when [Coach House editor] Alana
[Wilcox] or Kevin [Connolly] and everyone read it and said, “I was a little confused here, is there
anything you can do without ruining the integrity of the poem?” And so I add the word “the,” or
something, and everything is clearer.
MT: Linda Besner wrote this article recently in Hazlitt (and she edited my book, so we’d had this
conversation before). We were talking about notes at the end. This is sort of a new phenomenon as
well: not that [those poets] are explaining their poems, but they’re explaining those parts of the
poem that the poem itself doesn’t explain. I hesitate to give into that. When you start, where do you
stop explaining the research that went into this poem?
MH: We’ve got a whole other conversation, a few hours long, if I were to explain everything I know
about fracking. But that’s not the important part; the important part is what’s happening to the
people whom I’m writing about.
EMN [to MT]: So what would you describe as the muse here, because it’s not science (at the start of
a poem, the speaker will be taking a left turn, and at the end he’s still taking a left turn)?
MT: If it were philosophy or history, no one would make a big deal about it, because that’s a part of
our assumed knowledge in the humanities. I want science to be just another piece of knowledge that
the poet-speaker has. I do worry sometimes that being known as the science poet is going to
ghettoize me somehow.
MH: [Your reception] is a difficult thing to talk about—
MT: Yes, and how I want my poems received is neither here nor there. It’d be nice to have them
read as I intend, but I have no control over how people will read them.
EMN: And I think Probably Inevitable could be read as non-scientific poetry. It’s very uncertain and
switches constantly from science to the everyday, the casual, which is a way of using science in a
very unscientific way.
MT: It’s holding up the certainty the science purports to give us vs. the uncertainty that we all live in.
In the poem, those two things chafe: the mystery of life and the certainty of life. This is in hindsight,
but maybe that’s why I brought those things together, to highlight how much we don’t know, as
opposed to how much we do.
EMN [to MH]: Did you ever fear your subject matter would overtake the poems?
MH: I’ve noticed myself [making that happen] occasionally. I’ve done readings where the audience
isn’t the typical poetry audience, like they’re there to hear music, and maybe some poetry as well, and
I find myself saying things like, “this poem is about a day I bought an apple at the store.” That’s not
at all what the poem is about, it’s just what I happen to be doing in it—because [the poems] are not
about the oil fields, but more than that. So I was worried about that—
MT: It’s an easy way to talk about a poem.
MH: And I was also worried, because the book is themed in that way, that I would end up writing
the same poem sixty times.
EMN [to MT]: To end on a broader discussion, you’ve mentioned in a couple of recent interviews
that you’re insistent on not failing. Considering the stringent-ness of some of [Probably Inevitable], is
writing a poem a competitive thing for you?
MT: Well, you’re bound to failure. No poem ends up being the poem you thought you’d write. A
poem is all about delay of meaning to the point that it’s ineffable. You can never really say, with
certainty, something in a poem. With that built into the poem, it’s always going to fail as a
communicative device—the idea of failure is something we live with as poets.
MH: The goal is so high. When you’re trying to communicate something, and you’ve chosen to do it
through the medium of a poem, then you’ve accepted that you can never communicate that thing.
EMN: But there must be some bigger failure, the acceptable failure.
MT: The “Brilliant Mistake,” like Elvis Costello said. That’s all we can hope for, to follow our
mistakes, because the mistakes or the failures are what make the poem. Our control of the poem is
not complete. We make mistakes, but in those mistakes we find something we want to follow. So
the fact that we can’t be successful is a good thing. We can’t sit down and write the poem that’s in
our heads completely, but we have to find it.
EMN: What does that say about control? Are you the producer of the poem or do you corral the
poem?
MT: I think the director of a film is an interesting comparison. You can kind of control the actors
and the cinematographers, but these are different people with different consciousness, so you
cannot control the piece. It’s a communal effort. With a poem, you can’t know what’s coming next.
The unexpected trips you up all the time, but you have to learn to recognize the unexpected as
something worthwhile.
MH: Just like you can’t write a poem to shade some [specific] thing in. And I don’t know if a poem
is ever done until it’s read; it’s a collaboration in meaning.
MT: But what defines the success of a poem? I don’t know. What measurement am I using? Is it
exactly what I wanted to say, or is it that someone read it and said it’s a good poem?
MH: When I’m trying to discover if this is a good poem or a bad poem, even the ruler is abstract. I
think, “how properly does it realize itself? How well does it fill out the form that it has dictated for
itself?” Which is so … circular.
EMN: I think the shaky foundation this question is built on—and the reason we can’t answer it—is:
what is a poem? I have that “why is the sky blue?” moment sometime, because a poem can do so
many different things. I’ve been wondering this since I read Derrick Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound. It’s all
in careful Walcott couplets, yet it’s biography [of the painter Camille Pissaro], art history, and art
criticism at the same time. I learned stuff from that book. If a poem can do that amongst so much
else, how do you define what a poem is?
MT: Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things. It’s about taxonomy and science. Verse was used to
impart knowledge. We don’t think of it doing that.
EMN: So what is a poem?
MH: I’m in no position …
MT: Let me write ten more books. We all have our aesthetic ideas. It’s a question of becoming aware
of that in order to challenge it.
MH: I’ve got my own idea of what I’m trying to do and what the medium of poetry is best at. But it
conflicts constantly with other people’s ideas, and I’m not confident enough in my version to accept
it when I know that it conflicts with so many other people. So my definition is necessarily fluid.
MT: It’s not innate; it comes from the culture. So, how much do you let that inform your idea of
what a poem is?
MH: And through practice, right? And in reading.
EMN: Here’s my thought that I can’t shake: is a poem a joke?
MT: As in set up, set up, punch line?
EMN: Maybe. I think it’s awesome when a poet pulls the punch line off. [To MH]: When you
mentioned earlier that you felt you had an instinct to over-determine the end, were you working
toward a punch line?
MH: Sometimes. It’s more that I have a natural rhythm that writes and writes—then shuts down
really quickly, with a turn at the end. It’s rare that I’m working toward a punch line, but often, I
suddenly close a poem off at the end.
EMN: Well, a joke is a pattern, then a turn from the expected. So is it that language, or how we use
it, is a pattern, and we [poets] are just turning it at certain points? If the turn is the poetic equivalent
of the punch line.
MT: People have challenged this idea—certainly Perloff—of the formula for the poem that has the
turn at the end. Once you become aware of that—and maybe in my first book I didn’t know that a
poem could move differently than that—then you work against it. That’s the evolution of any kind
of art.
MH: And a turn is no longer a turn. You’ll notice my tendency is [to end a poem on a turn]; a lot of
the poems [in The Lease] don’t do that, because I’m aware of it. It’s a shifting thing.
EMN: And if we consider “joke” in a wider sense, as an ambiguity—
MT: And its seed is in language.
MH: The problem with [the comparison] is that when we think about “joke,” it’s difficult to take it
away from humour. So the ideas conflict, because often poems aren’t funny.
EMN: Something we were talking about earlier, with the echoing [of sound], and widening the idea
of rhyme, calling them “echoes” and letting them go without categorizing them—
MH: It’s more than just sound, it’s also the rhyming of ideas off of each other, or images, or events.
EMN: Yes, and so if we broaden the definition of a joke, out into anything that implants ambiguity
in the language—
MT: But in a joke that ambiguity is resolved, and that’s what makes it funny. I don’t know if poems
ever work that way; it has to stay within that ambiguity to become a successful poem.
EMN [to MT]: Okay, now, if the turn is to the poem as the punch line is to the joke: if a comedian
came in here, they might say, “punch line? You have to have three punch lines, they need to invert
each other?”
MT: There’s The Aristocrats where the idea isn’t in the [punch line] itself, but in finding the humour
elsewhere. You might not find that in the punch line, but in the anticipation of the punch line. What
happens if you never end the joke? Is it still funny, is it still a joke?
MH: They’re both collaborative: there are two people participating in the telling of the joke, as with
poetry. But I don’t know if it’s to an equal degree. But I’m not sure; I wonder if that’s a part of the
ambiguity, if the resolution [in a joke] is often left on the other side [from where it is in poetry].
MT: You can never know what the other person is thinking; the only way you can know is if you
laugh at the same time.
EMN [to MT]: Getting back to your thought on The Aristocrats, how are you using turns in Probably
Inevitable? There are turns, but to me, it’s like there are so many, so scattered …
MT: I did think about this. A lot of the poems run a page and a half. I want, instead of having that
turn as a stop, to instead bury the end further up, or maybe have many ends, or play with the idea of
an end and have the poem run out. Duration was more important than any overall shaping of the
poem.
MH: There’s the beginning, middle and end, or perhaps the end is [a] sputtering. I won’t say it’s
about time …
MT: I had this idea of a balloon filled with air and you press down on it and it’s sputtering out until
it’s: “phssss.” That’s the poem. Then you fill it up with air again. It’s the capacity of the poem that
determines when the end comes, not so much the internal logic of the poem.
MH: Or, [the end’s determined] by which bit of air comes out at the end.
EMN: If it’s not logic or argument, then, is it structure, or sound, that determines the end?
MT: Yes. The form is not necessarily internally driven—the poem itself does not determine how
long the poem takes to finish. The constraint is that the poem has to fit this duration. I consciously
chose that. But because my idea of what a poem is works against that, I still find ways to make that
poem conform to ends, or turns, or whatever you want to call them. There’s still cohesiveness there
in some of the strands. There’s this idea that all the strands are kind of picked up when the poem
stops.
MH: You were speaking earlier of the editing process, and writing past what you need. Through that
kind of editing process, you have the ability to take that amount of space and change what is filling
up that space.
EMN: Why that length?
MT: Intuitive. I think about the demands on the reader. I do pack a lot into that page and a half, but
maybe two and a half pages might’ve lost that cohesiveness. The first few ended up that length and
the rest followed suit.
EMN: Do either of you see yourself breaking out of that short form?
MT: Absolutely. You never know what next step you’re going to take.
MH: Like you said, in the first [book] you’re going to get little threads of what the next one is going
to be about. I’ve found that’s already true with what I’m starting to work on now.
EMN [to MH]: Any idea which of these poems you’re going to pick up the threads of?
MH: No idea. I’m greatly influenced by the fact that I’m now thinking about what the next poems
will be about. I’ll find that information anywhere. I’m on the streetcar and all around me are the
poems I’m writing. I’m going to find it because it’s what I’m thinking about. There’s a fallacy for
that: looking for a particular result, you find it everywhere.
EMN [to MT]: Any idea what’s next?
MT: No.
EMN: This is your third, so what’s it like detaching from a book?
MT: The experience is painful. For The Hayflick Limit, I couldn’t stop. I had the book in, but I just
kept writing. I had another twenty poems. Then I had a big gap [before] I started writing Probably
Inevitable. Those [twenty] poems are in purgatory. I didn’t dismiss them because they were bad
poems, it’s just that it was a struggle to get to something new. The inertia from [Hayflick] spilled
over, kept going. I want to challenge myself. I don’t want to write the same book again.
MH: It’s terrifying that you could even accidentally do it.
MT: In some ways, you can’t avoid doing it, because you are who you are, but you have to make as
much effort as possible to push off from that last book. The business of poetry makes you push off.
You have to tour with the book, and you read the same poems that you then get sick of. It forces
you to look at the book as an object instead of something that’s fluid and in flux. It’s static.
EMN [to MH]: And with you, the writing of this was a distancing from an actual experience, and
then touring with it must return you to that place—so how far away are you now?
MH: I have never spoken more about the oil field than I have in the last two-and-a-half months. It
was once just a thing, and now it’s the only thing I talk about.
MT: And you must be saying the same things, too. You’re not discovering new things about the oil
fields.
MH: I feel like that guy who only has one thing to talk about. But I swear I’ve done other things.
I’ve seen movies. Let me tell you about this movie I saw, or anything. I won’t want to write about the
oil fields anymore.
MT: But it’s not like you exhaust a subject by writing about it. I mean, time and poetry? People have
been writing about that for … I could write about that for the rest of my life, and not even touch it.
E MARTIN NOLAN writes poetry and non-fiction. You might know him as Ted. He received his
MA in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto in 2009. His non-fiction has
appeared in The Detroit Free Press, Pucklife.com, Hockeyinsociey.com and The Toronto Review of Books. His
poems have appeared in The Toronto Quarterly, The Puritan and Contemporary Verse 2. He is currently
working on a poetry manuscript entitled For the Ghost of Muley Graves and looking for a home for
another, Still. He teaches and writes in Toronto. He can be reached at [email protected].
Read more at emartinnolan.wordpress.com.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 20: Winter 2013
JESSICA COMOLA is currently an MFA student at the University of Mississippi. Her work has
appeared or is forthcoming in Everyday Genius, Anti-, The Journal and HTML Giant, among others.
ANDREA GRASSI used to work as a copywriter in advertising and for magazine until she decided she
wanted to become a research librarian. She is graduate student at University of Toronto’s iSchool.
She also folds shirts and stacks books for money. Ad infinitum, she is moved by three little words:
cup of coffee. You can sometimes read new things by going to agrassi.com or following her tweets
(@andGrassi). Currently, her first manuscript is being read by Claudia, Jack, and Andrew. (Also,
Grassi would like to give a shout-out to Kim at the Staples copy and print center).
DAVID HANCOCK has received playwriting OBIE Awards for The Race of The Ark Tattoo and The
Convention of Cartography, both presented by the Foundry Theatre. His other theatrical works include
Deviant Craft, Our Lot (with Kristin Newbom), The Puzzle Locker, The Incubus Archives, and Booth.
Hancock is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship, the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in Theatre, a
Whiting Writers’ Award, and a TCG/NEA Playwriting Residency Fellowship. Hancock’s recent
stories can be found in Permafrost, The Massachusetts Review, Interim, Ping Pong and Amarillo Bay. His
essays on playwriting have appeared in American Theatre, and his co-authored fiction with Spencer
Golub is forthcoming or published in Petrichor Machine, Otis Nebula, Danse Macabre, scissors and spackle,
Pear Noir!, Inscape, Map Literary and Bluestem.
FINN HARVOR is a Canadian artist and writer, and lives with his wife in South Korea. He’s
published art and writing in Eclectica, Canadian Notes and Queries, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Korea
Times, Dogmatika, Dark Sky, the Quarterly Conversation, rabble, the HUFS International Journal of Foreign
Studies, The Globe and Mail, Now Weekly, The Canadian Forum, This Magazine and several other
publications. He’s written and staged two fringe plays, and had his work broadcast by the CBC
[radio]. He has had group and solo shows of his drawings, and continues to experiment with artand-text work. Finally, he blogs at Conversations in the Book Trade.
MATHEW HENDERSON is the author of The Lease (Coach House Books, Fall 2012) and is a recent
graduate of the University of Guelph’s MFA program. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he
now lives in Toronto, writes about the prairies and teaches at Humber College.
LIZ HOWARD is an MFA student in creative writing at the University of Guelph and lives in
Toronto. She is a member of the Influency Salon editorial group and co-cultivates the AvantGarden
Reading Series. Her work has appeared in The Capilano Review, ditch,, Matrix, and Misunderstandings
Magazine. In 2009 she was shortlisted for the LitPop Award for poetry. Skullambient, her first
chapbook (Ferno House Press, 2011) was recently nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.
RICH IVES has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust,
Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry,
fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North
American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review,
Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the
Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for
The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He
is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days,
Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at
http://silencedpress.com.
KEVIN KVAS is a graduate student at Concordia University in Montreal.
BEN LADOUCEUR lives in Toronto. His poems have been published in magazines like Prism
International, The Malahat Review, Arc, Dragnet, and Echolocation.
SANDRA LLOYD received a Bachelor of Science degree from U of T, a Nursing Diploma from
Humber College, and is currently pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing at U of T. Her prose and
poetry have appeared in publications including The Antigonish Review, The Windsor Review, and Other
Voices. She received a literary prize from MSVU in Halifax, served on the advisory board for
McMaster University’s Main Street Anthology and is a member of the Hamilton Poetry Centre.
MARCUS MCCANN is a poet and journalist. He is the author of Soft Where (2009, Chaudiere Books)
and The Hard Return (2012, Insomniac) and a number of chapbooks, including The Glass Jaw (2010,
Bywords) Town in a Long Day of Leaving (2010, above/ground), and Force Quit (2008, The Emergency
Response Unit). He is a winner of the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal, and was
shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and the Robert Kroetsch awards. He now lives in Toronto,
where he studies law.
E MARTIN NOLAN writes poetry and non-fiction. You might know him as Ted. He received his
MA in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto in 2009. His non-fiction has
appeared in The Detroit Free Press, Pucklife.com, Hockeyinsociey.com and The Toronto Review of Books. His
poems have appeared in The Toronto Quarterly, The Puritan and Contemporary Verse 2. He is currently
working on a poetry manuscript entitled For the Ghost of Muley Graves and looking for a home for
another, Still. He teaches and writes in Toronto. He can be reached at [email protected].
Read more at emartinnolan.wordpress.com.
PETER NORMAN’s first poetry collection, At the Gates of the Theme Park (Mansfield Press, 2010), was
a finalist for the Trillium Poetry Book Award. His second, Water Damage, is forthcoming from
Mansfield Press in March 2013. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various magazines and
anthologies, including Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets and two editions of The Best Canadian Poetry in
English.
ROBIN RICHARDSON is the author of Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press) and the forthcoming
Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis (ECW Press). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in
many journals including Tin House, Arc, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and The Cortland
Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the ReLit award, longlisted for the CBC Poetry Award, and
has won the John B. Santoianni Award (awarded by The Academy of American Poets) and the Joan
T. Baldwin Award. Robin Richardson holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and is
currently living in Nova Scotia.
PATRICK ROESLE is from Jersey. He enjoys blogging, drawing, stargazing, and banging his head
against calculus and astronomy textbooks. He doesn’t enjoy writing novels, but does it anyway. His
first book, The Zeroes, is available on the Kindle and in paperback. His second book is culturing in its
Petri dish.
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Etobicoke. His poetry has most
recently appeared in The Puritan Compendium I and The Walrus. He was recently interviewed over at
the Conduit Canada blog.
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA won the 2004 ReLit Prize for her first poetry book, Small
Arguments. Pedlar Press will release her new collection in September 2013.
MATTHEW TIERNEY is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Hayflick Limit
(Coach House Books), which was shortlisted for a Trillium Book Award. His most recent book,
titled Probably Inevitable, considers the science and philosophy of time. It was released in Fall 2012.
He lives in Toronto.
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL ailed as the Canadian E Martin Nolan, Daniel Scott Tysdal is a poet of illrefute (he just can’t say, “No!”). He is the author of two books of poems, and he teaches creative
writing at UTSC.
PHOEBE WANG’s work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, Canadian Literature, Descant,
Grain and Diaspora Dialogue’s TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto. She graduated from University of
Toronto’s MA in Creative Writing program, and was recently a finalist of the CBC Poetry Prize.
More of her writing can be found at www.alittleprint.com.
RODNEY WILHITE is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. His work has previously
appeared in Cartographer, Splash of Red and elsewhere. A native of rural northeastern Oklahoma, he
currently lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.