Online Exclusives
What the Occasional Poem Can Be: A Conversation with Sina Queyras
Each year, The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest celebrates poems shaped by moments of public and private significance. In On Occasion: Poems for the People, poet and editor Sina Queyras gathers work that marks grief, celebration, encounter, memory, and community. In this conversation, Queyras reflects on editing the anthology, the social life of […]
What’s Brandon Nadeau Reading?
A novel with an odd name overran my newsfeeds a while back. I scrolled past it countless times, but it kept popping up until I stabbed it right in the title: Fancy Gap. The internet said it’s a dark story about an Appalachian family afflicted by illness, poverty, and toxic religion. It sounded like an […]
The 2026 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Winners
The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest! Winner Maria Giesbrecht “Sestina for Escape” Runner-Up Betsy Struthers “The Ice Age” Second Runner-Ups Leland Nicholas “Sea Brain” Jonathan Powers “Climbing In” Honourable Mentions Dagne Forrest “Again, with the Waiting” Bernadette Hendrickx “Early August Days” Alexander […]
Under Review: The Lost Season: A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded of Women by Stacey May Fowles
The Lost Season by Stacey May Fowles is a difficult book. That does not make it a bad book. It makes this book true. Fowles does not deliver wise platitudes about infertility, motherhood, and the loss of multiple identities in a polished arc of feminist idealism. Instead, the book inhales sorrow, and exhales deeply through […]
The 2026 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Longlist
After thorough consideration, we are excited to announce this year's longlist.
Kat Cameron’s Writing Space
The window in my office overlooks a red maple. The seedling was given to me by a neighbour in Ontario after the death of my first husband in 1993. My parents planted the seedling in their back yard, expecting it to grow into a shrub (Edmonton winters are not kind to maples). Instead, it’s a […]
Under Review: Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham
Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham is an unsettling reminder, an everywoman’s quest, to find and to understand the women of her lineage, their lost lives, their hopes, their names. Heirlooms are not enough: “a darning mushroom, / a tin of teaspoons. // Still the urge is for / story” (“Calling It […]
What’s Ziyad Saadi Reading?
I’m re-reading Adania Shibli’s seminal masterpiece Minor Detail. The first time I picked it up, I wanted to read it because, at the time, I had only read stories about Palestinians living in the diaspora. As a diaspora Palestinian myself, I related to many of them, but part of me knew that my identity as a Palestinian reader […]
What’s Patrick Cunningham Reading?
A student of English literature by instinct and by trade, there is often a great deal of overlap between what I read for pleasure and what I read for my research. Because I work in contemporary British literature, I find my tastes in fiction run in that direction, too, and so when it comes time […]
Finding the Form with Leona Theis
It’s not surprising, then, that “Shelter,” which appears here, is itself a hermit-crab essay, describing shelters both concrete and metaphorical, one after another. This form offered me a vehicle to explore the question of whether a human being ever leaves behind their childhood home. And I literally bring the hermit crab’s own housing strategy into my exploration: throughout its lifetime, a hermit crab finds and adopts a sequence of homes, typically shells discarded by other creatures.