Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Tom Wayman
I first met Giorgio, who eventually served as Toronto’s poet laureate between 2004 and 2009, when I went to the University of Windsor to be their writer-in-residence 1975-76. My poetry collection Money and Rain, published by Macmillan of Canada in 1975, had included poems about an eight-month stint working in Burnaby, B.C. as a factory […]
What is Melody Goetz Reading?
First to say that my introverted self has found the seclusion required of this pandemic, for the most part, as “permission” to deepen the contemplative, creative path that calls. Still, there is the awareness of many for whom this is not so, and for whom much assails, and so sorrow and concern also sits with […]
Finding the Form with Lori Sebastianutti
My essay Seeing in 3D, was a project five years in the making. For the longest time, it lived only in my head, snippets appearing while washing dishes or folding mini blue and black track suits into neat piles. Having a crisis of faith is hard to think about, let alone write about. Plus a […]
What is Edward Dewar Reading?
“Some invisibility would come in handy” is one of my favourite lines by Wislawa Szymborska. I often ask myself, if I had to choose three poets and they would be the only poets I could read for the rest of my life, which three would I select? Would it be best to focus on free […]
Finding the Form with Ami Sands Brodoff
My mother hadn’t been feeling well. She’d developed a throat-clearing tic that seemed to come out of nowhere. We were all worried. After a battery of tests, it emerged that mom had lung cancer. She’d been a smoker for a long time, but had quit decades earlier. My relationship with my mom, a psychiatrist, had […]
What is Bernadette Rule Reading?
I’ve been reading a fair bit of fiction lately, most recently Richard Powers’ The Overstory, & Jack by Marilynne Robinson. However, the book that has given me the greatest charge during this locked down winter (as it has been doing for about 20 years!) is Gertrude Schnackenberg’s The Lamplit Answer. It’s a book of poetry published in the 1980s […]
Finding the Form with Alice Zorn
Place speaks to me, and when I travel, I keep detailed notebooks in the hope that I’ll one day get an idea for a story in that setting. I wrote this story, “The Land of Clouds”, in 2018, a year after I returned from Oaxaca in Mexico. I didn’t know about weaving with feathers before […]
An Interview with Susan J. Atkinson
Like many poets, Susan J. Atkinson had been writing for a long time before the launch of her first book, The Marta Poems, in December of 2020. The New Quarterly poetry editors are not alone in their admiration for the work of this Ottawa-based poet. This interview touches on the book’s publication, subject matter, and poetic […]
Thursday’s Child: The Marta Poems by Susan J. Atkinson
As a poetry editor for The New Quarterly, I first encountered Susan J. Atkinson’s work when reviewing forty applications for an Ontario Arts Council grant about two years ago. Among the poems carefully excerpted from in-progress manuscripts by writers both emerging and well established, her selection stood out—a unanimous choice by our four-person poetry editorial […]
Poem in a Pocket Leads to Singing in a Parkade
if only for one
ruby-throated moment
you could drink
from the chalice of the sun