Long Exposure is Stephanie Bolster’s fifth and most recent poetry collection. Readers may know Bolster’s writing from her Governor General’s Award winning The Alice Poems, her first book (1998) through to her fourth, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (2012). After Wonders, she noted in an online interview with Poetry in Voice, that “increasingly I feel that the best poetry arises from some social calling, or fulfills some social need.” Long Exposure does just that.
The collection opens with the words, “It is not something that begins.” Following about a 10-line white space giving readers time to consider, then continues:
Before there was land there was water. A place silted itself up. Around the time of the pyramids parts of other places made this place.
and, so, we are introduced to Long Exposure and to New Orleans, a key place for the unfolding of Bolster’s theme.
“What began in 2009,” Bolster writes in the acknowledgements, “as an interrogation of my unsettling fascination with Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans became an education that has lasted for 16 years and does not end here.” As Bolster probes Polidori’s images, she notes how the hurricane’s destruction was multiplied many times over by failure of the unmaintained levies. And she resurrects other disasters: Chernobyl and the nuclear meltdown of 1986, the Interment of Japanese-Canadians in B.C. during WWII, Mothers of the Disappeared in Mexico. She exposes a litany of social atrocities in the compelling and extraordinarily-crafted singular poem, Long Exposure.
Bolster’s collection is a kind of rabbit hole, a warren of man-made disasters. She tells us:
Sometimes to look is merciful, sometimes to turn away. (32)
The poetic images are, themselves, horrific. In “Shelter Object,” she introduces the first of the Chernobyl poems:
The constellations made of fear. Chaos where a shape was. Stars where a roof.
A fire where a place. The world asleep in its bed. World irrevocable.
The heat unfathomable. They worked shirtless. Already acute in hospital.
Soon coffins of zinc. Soon they’d gut the wards of the dead.
The writing builds to a crescendo. Following 17 couplets, the tone and pace shift, slow to conversational speed:
His mother asked when the bus was coming and in a while she asked and again and then didn’t and he turned she was dead. He covered her there in her wheelchair outside the Convention Centre.
The review is published in FreeFall Magazine, to read the full review click here.
Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y’s second full collection of poetry. It follows From the Shoreline and Merienda, which was nominated for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Tad-y’s “themes of kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind” continue in her new collection.
Steffi Tad-y makes poems out of the world she knows: the bipolar world of the title’s Ward. From the prologue poem, you will slip into Tad-y’s rhythm and her spell, her taut, compressed poems, the white space that works for her, and the way the poems resonate with each other, and you will lose yourself in Tad-y’s words, her craft. Accessibility and depth enrich these poems, a sign of a poet skilled in her craft.
The collection begins with the prologue poem, which introduces us to voice and form:
Episode
Illness, unpinnable. In my head, I was mother
to a god, god to a mother.
Body belonging to men. The doctor reported
distorted, disheveled. Desire taken to extremes.
We meet her mother, her father. She is offered
…fish stew & cake. In an instant, I am
the days I covet, the child in my dreams.
From the personal of “Episode,” she shifts to addresses the reader in “You Who The Earth Was For,” or is she speaking to the younger self she has just introduced? Here we witness one of the tensions within and between the poems. It holds me like a magnet.
The first poem following the epigraph, expands on the ideas expressed in the prologue poem, and it provides readers with more insight into what lies beneath the surface of the poetry.
You Who The Earth Was For
After Jean Valentine
You fleeing war, carrying a rooster with your shaky hand. You trained to pummel, never the first to wince or flinch.
You who plant their sadness into dirt. You whose questions have no gentle answers.
You who cook too close to the stove. You at the table, missing the one.
You whose loss comes with wordlessness. You beside the rubble, out to build again.
You in the backseat being loved. You running towards water.
Knowing something of American poet Jean Valentine offers a clue to understanding Tad-y’s work. According to the Poetry Foundation website, Valentine’s “lyric poems delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political.’ …David Kalstone said of her work, ‘Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of…short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.’ Adrienne Rich wrote of Valentine’s work, ‘This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.’” Something of the same can be said of Tad-y’s poetry, which is also political (i.e. mental health/the ward) and personal (kinship, diaspora). This high praise is deserving.
The collection includes twelve numbered poems that are sprinkled throughout the book; each is a numbered “Notes from the Ward.” #1 is a list poem – each stanza a single sentence, observations, setting. The second is disorienting, disconcerting. The third is “After Ocean Vuong’s ‘Reasons for Staying’ and lists memories, and “Seconds of optimism.”
To read the entire review please see The Temz Reviewhere.
The Pollination Field by Kim Fahner gifts lovers of bees and devotees of folklore (perhaps the first of the natural sciences) with poetry rich and layered. In these pages, Fahner confronts the immense time that bees have done the pollinating work that led to a riot of flowering plants early in the warm Cretaceous period through to today. The collection explores not science alone, it also revels in the folklore of bees, lore carried across the ocean by the Irish, Scots, and British diaspora.
In “A Bee in the House” (3), the speaker listens to “a baritone that conjures a bagpipe’s drone.” Fahner describes the bee as “Stained glass, those wings, like tiny windows / you look through, trying to find answers to questions / that have only been imagined….” She tells us, “A bee is good luck.” Here, in the prologue poem, Fahner establishes the overriding theme, the blessing of bees, and the searching tone of the collection.
While some of the poems, like the prologue poem, are lyrical, others flirt at being prose poems. Poems with long lines. Poems that present fact. It is primarily in these that we glean the science as we do in “Bee Grabbers” (68) that looks at the “chameleon” predator, Conopidae that inject their eggs into the abdomen of bees:
Ten to twelve days. Larvae that grow, silent invasive alien, and a bumble that buries itself—headfirst, head in sand—before it dies. In between, from start to finish: bee suckles, ignorant of false pregnancy, internal parasites that mark its end.
However, look deeper. Conopidae may be metaphor after all: Lost is the “keen prospects / of lively offspring. Don’t look back; your conscience might / catch up to you, turn your ankle.” The poems in The Pollination Field can trip you up, tease you; Fahner’s poetic mastery creates a honeycomb of meaning.
The review is published in FreeFall Magazine. To read the whole review, please click here.
On the shoulder, waiting for a break, / me and this sleek crow, its cape / tucked and trim. (“Crushed”)
In What is Broken Binds Us, Lorne Daniel’s fifth poetry collection, he explores brokenness and the binding of lives within family and across generations and continents. The poems explore the shattering of bodies and minds, the brokenness of a society that condoned slavery and the racism that continues, and the diaspora that is reality for so many of us. Through a kind of kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold, which emphasises the cracks rather than hiding them) Daniel names the shattering with poignancy, resilience, and beauty.
The collection is skillfully organized; the poems in each section closely relate in subject and theme. But there’s also a weaving that brings the overall threads together like a tapestry.
The first poem of the first of the seven sections in What is Broken Binds Us serves as a prologue poem, introducing many of the themes in the collection in Daniel’s clear, accessible, poetic voice. In “Lessons in Emergency Preparedness” (a three-part poem), we meet a younger poet/speaker Proudly / poor and adulting hard, a husband and new father, who would clamber onto my rusted one-speed / with its great sweeping handlebars / —wide as albatross wings— / and wheel urgently to the Office / of Emergency Preparedness. Daniel takes us into the workspace and introduces the team. There is an off-hours emergency, but the Emergency Preparedness friends have
…No plan. I checked my wrist for some reason, then the wall clock, the school gym. It was 12:25, the second hand still, improbably, moving.
Daniel captures an existential reality, our helplessness when the world we know turns upside down. And he does this with hints of humour, surprise, and irony.
“Crushed” is the transition between the first poem, in which death appears, and the following poems in the section that explores the broken body. It contains one of my favourite images: On the shoulder, waiting for a break, / me and this sleek crow, its cape / tucked and trim. The triad of danger, fear and survival, which theme the collection.
In the second section, Daniel broadens the scope: It is easy / to dip into purse and wallet, / give back the money. Cede the land. The bullets do not go easily / back into the barrel… (“Giving Back the Dream”).
There are echoes of Joni Mitchell in “What Has Taken Place”:
…No plan. I checked my wrist for some reason, then the wall clock, the school gym. It was 12:25, the second hand still, improbably, moving.
Daniel captures an existential reality, our helplessness when the world we know turns upside down. And he does this with hints of humour, surprise, and irony.
“Crushed” is the transition between the first poem, in which death appears, and the following poems in the section that explores the broken body. It contains one of my favourite images: On the shoulder, waiting for a break, / me and this sleek crow, its cape / tucked and trim. The triad of danger, fear and survival, which theme the collection.
In the second section, Daniel broadens the scope: It is easy / to dip into purse and wallet, / give back the money. Cede the land. The bullets do not go easily / back into the barrel… (“Giving Back the Dream”).
There are echoes of Joni Mitchell in “What Has Taken Place”:
what has taken place here where roots of Garry oak are paved over? what stories have been told of this place? what does placemaking mean where place has been taken? taken over meadow turned city street bearing the name of a Spanish naval officer
Daniel is a questioning poet; he urges us to think, to consider what we’re doing, what we’ve already done.
In “The Family Name,” the third section of What is Broken Binds Us, the poems dig into heritage and migration, the roots of who we’ve become and the lonely search of those in the diaspora. In Scottish English, to ken means to know, to see, to understand. The family immigrated to Canada from the U.S. and before that from Scotland. In “Kenning,” the family makes a pilgrimage to Charleston, the Magnolia Plantation, to confront slavery. “In the Family Name” is one of the most powerful poems in the book. Daniel writes,
Stories, grief, celebration. Distance, absence, loss. Where to start, as a Daniel bearing the name of an English enslaver… […] …returning to the ties, to touch what binds, to wonder what releases the knotted, twisted, tangled.
In the fourth section, we return to the immediate family and the infant introduced in the first poem, now a sleepwalker, a three-year-old talker: Well into the night, he swings / from story to song. The halting rhythms / hypnotic as his voice rises and rises / until with one high note he slips away. In succeeding poems, he literarily slips away into chaos. Somehow Daniel writes these poignant poems without pathos, without sentimentality.
The theme of uncontrollable chaos lingers in the fifth section,
Please click The Temz Review to read the balance of the review. This is where the review is published.
I’d sit with Napoleon in exile
and chat casually. (St. Helena)
The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston brings together sharp, edgy, quirky voices in which the actor/poet speaks for the historic and the legendary, for a songbird, oxygen, and a board of directors. On first reading of Elston’s collection, thoughts of lad lit, then theatre of the absurd surface (Six Actors in Search of an Author?), but these poems are neither superficial or existential. A second reading challenges the first impression of witty lightness. The poems imagine; they reimagine, and they question. Elston’s “voice” is clear, clever, and has something to say.
The collection’s initial poem, “The Stake,” begins: “The night before, / and Joan is certain. As ever.” Like the absurdist existential authors of the 1950s, the ending mirrors the beginning: “Oh, I’ll burn, Joan laughs. / I do every time. Your move.” The magic lies in the couplets between. The chess-playing voice asks: “Do I want to make her wonder?” In the fifth couplet Joan asks: “How can these cassocked frauds judge me, / Joan sighs. Are you like them?” The voice watches a spider. Chess, a suggestion that life and death are a game? The spider, an allusion to spider-wisdom à la Charlotte’s Web? There’s also a “fallen bishop” and much to ponder.
This prologue poem introduces key themes that thread through The Character Actor Convention. Thoughts of dying and death subtly weave through the poems, as do games. The bishop (religion) and judging also thread through the collection, as they do in “St. Helena” (21) where the voice plays cards with Napoleon:
St. Helena
I’d sit with Napoleon in exile
and chat casually.
There are more variants of Patience
named after me than any other man,
he’d mention, casually. He had a habit
of counting waves and cheating
every time we played cards.
The money meant nothing to him,
less than nothing to me.
You do know that nobody
who joins me here may leave?
he sometimes asked, while watching
the distance for sails. I dug a little hole
in the sand with my left foot.
All summer, I never told him
we don’t even have God in the future.
Joan and Napoleon aren’t the only characters that confront death. In “For a Good Time” (57), fish fly larvae “die within days.” Elston refers to other historical personalities who meet death – “eight / dead Philippes. Eleanor of Castile, / of Provence, of Aquitaine…Joan of Arc…the dead Louis’s.” But I’m struck by the fish flies – hundreds gathered on outside furniture this spring and every light-coloured surface in my river town, crunching underfoot as I walked on downtown stinking. What inspires Elston to combine fish fly larvae with these historical figures? His vision is playful, unique, and surprisingly perfect. He draws us in with the whimsy and stops us with insight and the juxtapositions of his subjects. Life is brief for both the larvae and us. Life is so brief, the voice “stop[s] gunrunning, / start[s] writing poems.”
The title poem falls mid-collection (33).
To read the full review, please click here for the link to The tEmz Review.
In July, I read a review of Legwork by Michael Vince, his tenth collection, in The High Window Reviews. I travel and often write about my experiences and was curious; I ordered the book.
The reviewer, Edmund Prestwich, notes how the poet “interweaves gravity with quirky humour,” how the poems often include a “shimmer of implicit reflections,” and sometimes the poems take on a “more cerebral, conceptual form.”
Although the poems are set in specific places with specific details, the actual location is not named, and the poet manages, with apparent ease, to jump the gap from personal to universal. I often find the poems take me on a surprising journey, as my favourite poem does:
Spa Town
We walk to the spa town, just a small village, hard going in the heat, though nobody seeking for its healing waters goes there on foot, uphill and down, it’s just too much for them, like the sudden appearance of a tethered bull or a flurry of chickens, where rocks and pines hide the sea view. On the spa town streets elderly folk no longer linger over lunch, or smoke and sip at coffee, but well wrapped in layers of showy abstinence and in cosy dressing-gowns seek health-restoring waters. Here we watch one, an old man in pyjamas, stroll out unsteadily down a concrete pier towards the ocean, followed by a ginger cat, tail up, pacing to keep company. The man turns back several times and mutters, exchanging nods with this attentive creature who hasn’t come here for its health. They look like a couple out for a walk, taking the air on holiday. When they reach the end of the pier perched above the waves, the cat sits and grooms. The old man lights a cigarette, and convinces himself that nobody can see, while the ginger cat waits, much like a nurse, or a child out with grandpa, who comes each year for coffee-less, wine-less days. The old man gazes out, where the healing waters mingle with the bitter salt. He takes laboured breaths, then turns. He says the word, the cat agrees, and they both begin their slow return to the shore.
A poem with a very different feel from “Spa Town” is “Borderland,” which begins: “She told me the day they crossed over, / almost as if it was a holiday….” It’s a homecoming poem in which memory, dissociation, and the absurd collide. In part 2, Vince writes: “People from across the border / come here to walk around the suburb, / the designs are quite famous, / people whose grandparents lived here / when it was another country. …Home, that’s a flexible idea, isn’t it? / Have some more wine.”
Vince writes on his website: “I’ve always been interested in the historical and psychological pressure points of living in a particular place…. As I have lived and worked for much of my life in other countries, and being part of a bi-cultural family, my writing explores places and people, feelings and experiences, with that perspective. I believe that we constantly explore and recreate such identities, which shift through time and place and language….”
If you follow my reviews, you know that I read many Canadian writers. Yet, I think it’s important to read widely and internationally. There are different tones, different ways to find the core of a subject, shifts of perspective. What are you reading?
I love a long poem and the collections that follow the narrative thread of a journey from page one to the end – whether it flows, as a novel, or whether it’s more of a sequence of shorter poems that unravel the story.
Ottawa poet Monty Reid says that “the sequence accommodates interruptions more readily, it stops and starts, tries to hold it together, begins again…. (interview by rob mclennan, above-ground press).
The books that I’ve selected to highlight today include both flowing book-length poems and sequence collections.
I’ve reviewed only two of the long-poem collections that have been sitting in my “to write about” stack. But it’s summer reading time, and I’m not going to get the job done. So here is a reading list to take you through August and beyond.
Two that I’ve reviewed:
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney: an illustrated edition “is beautiful to read, vivid, alive,” to quote from my review (W.W. Norton, 2008). Click here.
Iolaire by Karen Clavelle “is a hybrid telling of one of Scotland’s worse maritime disasters, a story of an island’s grief, a woman’s loss, and by the end, a new (though haunted) beginning” (Turnstone Press, 2017). Click here.
Others of the book-length form that I recommend as good summer reading include:
Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard by Jenna Butler (University of Alberta Press, 2018)
Dart by Alice Oswald (Faber and Faber, 2002)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Anansi, 2018)
The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie (Anansi, 2019)
Three books by Kim Trainor: Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*Hug, 2018), and a fragmented narrative, A thin fire runs through me (icehouse poetry, 2023)
Omeros by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus, and Geroux, 1990)
And finally, a collection by M. Travis Lane titled The Witch of the Inner Wood. Like novellas, these poems celebrate the long poem format. Lane’s book marks the consistent achievement of one of Canada’s leading poets (icehouse poetry, 2016).
Perhaps one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the cover of Rebellion Box is revealing. The illustration is dominated by a housedress trimmed in pink upon a paint-peeling background exposing an opaque scene that leads the eye to another and another. This, in a way, is what the poems do in Ghadery’s debut collection.
Opening to the first poem, “Postcard, Santa Maria,” we meet a girl, sensuous beside a pool, but then, a disclaimer: “I’m not that girl / anymore.” This, followed by the surprise “the cervix / of a fifteen-year-old, / my doctor says. / Not bad / for four kids” (1-2). And so, we are introduced to the speaker of many of the poems that follow, and a dominant theme of the collection is identified. Who is this woman who once lay by a pool in sunshine, who is a mother, who we will learn is biracial and bicultural, who attends historical talks, who writes poetry “to get [her] thoughts straight,” as suggested in an article Ghadery published in The New Quarterly.
In that article, Ghadery refers specifically to the title poem (45-46), a sestina, in which form controls and shapes the poem – a box as it were, for sharing the 1837 love story of Joseph, prisoner of the rebellion, and his love, Mary. The form disciplines Ghadery, allowing her to reveal the “mores and values” of the time in a tight, coherent way. Those mores and values are a constraint for the protagonist who cannot approach Mary directly, and I wonder, as I read through the collection time and again, if the Rebellion Box hasn’t become a metaphor for the constraints experienced by the poet herself.
To read the entire review that is published by FreeFall Magazine, please click here.
“Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, forthcoming Fall, 2025 — The editors wrote: “Our reviewers enjoyed reading your poem, which highlights moments when opposing forces come together—whether in nature or within ourselves. We also admired the choice of words, the use of enjambment and punctuation, and the masterful use of meter.”
“Unmarked: A Lament for the Children Buried in the Unmarked Graves of Residential Schools,” Strong Hands Stop Violence poetry anthology, ONWA, Vol. 9 (December 2025)
“On that Forbidden Evening,” “Willow Dream,” and “Albinoni’s Adagio,” Live Encounters, Volume Four, 16th Anniversary, November-December 2025
“Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, (2025-09-22)
“She Sings Only at Twilight,” “Company of Wayfarers,” “A Blizzard Blows,” “Phantasm,” and “Beloved,” Lothlorien Poetry Journal Volume 28 (print and online) Sept. 30, 2023).
“Musical Invocation” poem profiled and read/recorded, Jerry Jazz Musician (September 2023).
“Journey,” “Ashes,” This Wine into Water, a chapbook anthology (Forward by Lorna Crozier, Wintergreen Studios Press, December 2018.)
Earlier writing was published in literary journals including the Fiddlehead (#130 Summer 1981) Descant (#32-33 1981) and Northward Journal (#20 June 1981) as well as anthologies such as The Wisdom of Old Souls (2008), Grandmothers Necklace (2010), Close to Quitting Time (2011). (Some early poems published as Kathryn Deneau.)
Review of Wayside: a small boat, one vacant lot, a man by Antony Di Nardo (The Miramichi Reader)
Some words, when you string them together, defy their simplicity and create a world of their own. They take on the voice of their writer and that writer’s moment in time. And where mind and matter intersect, a singular world of genuine emotions, the poet’s “objective correlative,” comes to life on the page. Such is the art of Kathryn MacDonald. Hers is a vivid, intimate world, where Nature flourishes and serves as the source of her language, giving us Wayside: A small boat, one vacant lot, a man. Twenty-one poems. Twenty-one facets of a poet’s lyrical “I.”
These poems, both by design and content, are watercolours. Oils, pastels, hard acrylics, are made of edges, rely on borders, illusions based on blocks of space. I generalize, of course, but for me, watercolours blur the lines between what’s real and what is felt. They soften those distinctions between our inner and outer worlds and, in so doing, suggest sensations that intensify the human experience. Each poem in this collection has been rendered that way, with brushstrokes dipped in water, light and words. They evoke a faithfulness to life steeped in love and friendship despite the grief and sorrow of loss. And all of this MacDonald achieves without the gush of sentimentality.
These are wonderful poems. Literally, full of wonder and acceptance of a poet’s right to rearrange feelings into words. Her images, as one would expect, are exquisite. She paints tableaux that manifest the presence of another in their absence. She writes: “his lips brush mine when we part / leaving my blue bicycle wobbling.” So much is said in those few words: minimum of brushstrokes not only illustrate a fleeting moment but paint a powerful human emotion. Her use of “wobbling” – after a succession of alliterative b’s – is a master stroke of lyricism, its sound and sense depicting a feeling I associate with the thrill of uncertainty and stirrings of physical attraction. A heron “stands on willow-whip legs,” appears as a Modigliani figure that “strolled / along the dock” and becomes “a small grey man – / before taking flight.” I am awe-struck by that compression of a human figure and a giant bird in flight, the two synchronized to evoke the beautiful contradictions of Nature’s work. And MacDonald’s craft.
The skies are sometimes grey in Wayside. There is illness and tragic ultimatums. That “small grey man” who sails the Bliss, a small boat, must also face its loss. As does the painter of these poems who “listens as his cane shatters silence” and is resigned to acknowledge that “[c]ells in his body blossom multiply.” Loss is tragic and death inevitable, but life goes on and the poet puts that feeling into words:
Air sits heavy, burdened with coming rain. A tear breaks in the flock of cumulous clouds and light slips obliquely into the river’s mouth, slips onto moon-round lily leaves where flowers will one day bloom.
I so admire the cadence and sway of such fluid lines – I can’t say enough about their music, their subtle, almost imperceptible, alliterated syncopations! These lines are a testament to Kathryn MacDonald’s vivid way with words, both pictorially and sonically.
In this chapbook, kayaks resemble “elongated sunrises.” Reflections float “downriver / downriver / to the sea.” Dragonflies are dragons and “soar / in six directions, / hover / like hummingbirds.” A kiss is “as subdued as the gauzy sky, still as the mouth of the river.” Birds and flora, waterfront creatures populate these poems. And turtles. Turtles “especially.” MacDonald writes “I wonder if we were to decipher / the map carried on their backs / what journey might be revealed.” Her metaphors come naturally. They are both the light and brushstrokes of these poems. Here’s a scene she frames to portray dusk at the end of a summer’s day:
Day slips toward July’s long dusk the quiet hour when mallards and geese return to their nests, the great blue spreads his wings and flies to the willow’s shadows, an osprey circles toward its platform of sticks, the moon-pale swans glide across the bay.
This scene sets the mood for what transpires between two people when one must leave for good. I’ve never liked the term “pathetic fallacy” to describe the way poets personify their natural environment, it seems demeaning to me. Regardless, MacDonald’s use of this device gives us lines like these: “My sorrow wreaks havoc / with fast-falling snow / as I kick through drifts / that bury the river trail / to him.” She compresses both a narrative (her friend is dying) and an intense feeling (her sorrow) in a tightly woven yarn of diction, voice and theme. As for the dynamics of form and text that structure these poems, they are, in the words of Emily Dickinson, like Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam.
MacDonald’s art comes with a clear sense and understanding of what makes poetry, and how to translate emotion into words. Wayside is evidence of that. Pick up the book, open it to any page, there you’ll find a watercolour of metaphors, imagery and soundscapes that tell a story of a small boat, one vacant lot, a man … and, not to forget how books like these really come to be, of a poet’s working mind.
Details
Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. Her new poetry collection, The Blue Gate is available this Spring 2026 (Frontenac House). Kathryn has three chapbooks: Wayside: a small boat, a vacant lot, a man (Big Pond Rumours Press, 2026), Liminal Spaces , a chapbook anthology of ekphrastic poetry by Kathryn and three fellow-poets (Glentula Press, 2025), and Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (Glentula Press, 2024). Her first full poetry collection, A Breeze You Whisper: Poems, and a novel, Calla & Édourd were published by Hidden Brook Press (2011, 2009).
Antony Di Nardo lives in Cobourg, Ontario and is the author of seven books of poetry. His most recent, Forget-Sadness-Grass (Ronsdale Press 2022), was a CBC Books poetry pick. His suite, “May June July,” won Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. “Among the Boughs,” first published in The Fiddlehead, will appear in this year’s Best Canadian Poetry anthology.
Kathryn MacDonald 