Oubah Osman began exploring poetry when she was a teenager. As it is for many during that tumultuous time, writing was a way to process the emotions and events that comprise life experience. “I was able to communicate through poetry,” Osman says, reflecting on her early writing experience. “I think journaling was helpful and then […]
David Bradford, author of The Plot (House House Press), his third chapbook of poetry, speaks with Shazia Hafiz Ramji about unearthing family histories, “untellable grief,” and personal debris. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: What is The Plot? David Bradford: “The Plot” is actually the title of the poem, in four parts, spaced out throughout the chapbook—a title […]
Sanna Wani, author of the chapbook, The Pink of the Seams (Penrose Press), speaks with Shazia Hafiz Ramji about the “strange little immortal creatures” that are poems, the Ramadan treat of rose syrup, pink insides, and more. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: How did you arrive at The Pink of the Seams? Sanna Wani: Hmmm, I went […]
Years later, he would reach out for her hand as she walked, oblivious, past where he was standing on the train paused at Lionel-Groulx. By then she will have drawn the nectar from every memory, dried the fallen petals with constant thought—the slightly ridiculous sway of his hips to jazz, the kisses in her creased […]
Cody Caetano’s first chapbook, Pleasure Dome Poems, was published in January 2019 under Knife|Fork|Book’s What Queer Reading (WQR) imprint. Award-winning poet, Billy-Ray Belcourt, says Caetano’s work “bears a kind of pop art sensibility – it is slippery and agile and revisionist and campy and ethical and ultra contemporary. Some of the turns-of-phrases here are so […]
For National Poetry Month, Manahil Bandukwala, the author of the chapbook, Pipe Rose, talks to Shazia Hafiz Ramji about her second chapbook, Paper Doll, published by Anstruther Press. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: How does it feel to have a new chapbook? Manahil Bandukwala:I love chapbooks! As an emerging writer, they’re a very comfortable place to have […]
The pressure I feel as a Black woman to consistently write about my experiences with racism, and of a trauma that is supposed to come from those racist experiences, feels restrictive like a glass wall; a barrier to break through to take up space and exist.
THRILL-RIDE (OR, HOW I LEARNED TO ENJOY POETRY)By Amanda Ghazale Aziz I. Impression Online, you’ve seen poetry shared to express reprieve, a shift in seasons, global mood. On the runway, Pierpaolo Piccioli commissioned four poets: Greta Bellamacina, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Mustafa the Poet, and Robert Montgomery, to collaborate with him on his Valentino Fall/Winter 2019 collection, […]
She used to buy her mother flowers. They used to live in an apartment building crowded with flats, in a neighbourhood crowded with apartment buildings. In the previous decade, they’d moved five times – six if you count that first move across the Atlantic. Frankly, that first was the easiest of the moves, a pale […]
Whitney French is a writer and arts-educator. Her writing has been published in Quill and Quire, Geist, Descant Magazine, CBC Books and anthologized in The Black Notes: Fresh Writing From Black Women and Girls (2017) and The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry(2010). Whitney is also the founder and co-editor of the nation-wide publication […]