As with other aspects of poetry in canada, our Poetry Bookshelf is a work in progress. We will add new poets regularly, and archive those we feature here. While the project of building a bricks-and-mortar library will take time, we will slowly accumulate an online resource here that we hope will be useful both for poets and poetry readers.
I believe in striving to show how we are closer to each other than the powers that try to divide us.
So poetry can be a mirror, a window, a door—
a microscope, a telescope, a kaleidoscope!
I navigate the delicate balance between fragility and resilience, capturing the struggle to define oneself in the face of trauma and societal expectation.
And so, where do the seeds or beginnings of my poems come from? Nine times out of ten, it’s visual—I see the moment, the scene, and then build around it but always from the heart.
I’ve given up the fantasy of reconstructing a formally perfect 17th century Kashmiri Persianate world in my head by now. My effort to hold onto multiple languages will likely remain as imperfect and unfinished as it is rewarding, lively, and frequently hilarious; what matters most is persistence.
It validates either that you are not alone in how you have experienced or understand the universe, in all its beauty and horror; or that others are out here searching, too
By using creative expression as a form of research, I challenge conventional scholarly boundaries, embracing the subjective, emotional, and personal.
Once a poem is published, I’m curious to explore its second life, its border-blur with other people and media.
Poetry is a witness statement of my life—memories, longing, grief, fear.
We need to have practical ways of managing wildfires, but it’s also important to express how it feels when the air is suddenly unbreathable, or when the sky is yellow for days on end.
I used to be moved by work that was strange and avant garde (if that word means anything anymore), but the older I get I also want poetry to make me feel something
So much of poetry is connected to community. We do the writing alone, but we’re always working within a larger circle, speaking to the poets whose collections we love, whose writing lives in us as surely as our own words do.
Through poetry, I believe I can use pain and anger as productive, redemptive forces. I can write critically from a place of love, soften into tough but necessary conversations, and I can work to create an aura of inclusivity, granting space, as the universe does, to migraines and orgasms alike, to contradictory truths and multiple versions of the same story.
Poetry allows us to inhabit the experience and thoughts of another human being, to find some small part of ourselves reflected.
My mother hunted moose
as a child my grandfather taught her
how to field dress a bull:
make an incision from the throat
to the pelvis
Poetry is not a genre so much as a methodology for my interaction with the world. I am not a “solo” writer:
Reading one 16-line fragment is very different from reading 256 of them. Something very interesting happens when all those words pile up on each other over a few hours.
Poems connect us. They are intermediaries when grief blinds us, when joy takes our breath away, when memories visit in the night and don’t leave a trace.
To fully experience a poem is to eclipse our perceived selves and enter into something more heeding and resolute than the frangible cage of flesh, bone and breath that we exist in.
My poetry persists in a state of suspended completion[…] It remains flexible, changeable, ready to be adapted to the world and the needs of the moment.
Rooted in the indescribability and disembodiment of pain, Nisa Malli’s Allodynia looks outward to space and the future of humankind, as well as inward to the body.
A statement of poetics is always a work in progress and is therefore always subject to revision. Revision is to see anew. Revise always, or try to.
Many of my poems contain images of creatures, beings and experiences that have been somehow maligned or ostracized. I try to create space around them where they might be, at the very least, seen without so much stigma or judgement.
Poetry is at its best when it provides a space for radical work to exist. I’m not so much interested in the poem as I am interested in the expansive possibilities of what poetry can or cannot contain.
As a daughter of a flight crewmember, I grew up staring at maps and clouds from within airplanes. I was incubated in flight, my mother used to joke. I lean on this unique upbringing in the way I shape, write, and perform my poems
The moment is a fish and the poet a hook. Like the time I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth and my daughter was in the bathtub washing her hair.
Through writing, I hope to always have a path back to a home that I can no longer physically return to. Through poetry, I hope to make a home in a different shape, in another form.
The poetry I love best has no illusions about its limits, brings us to the furthest threshold of what’s possible in language, then lets us go. This kind of poetry is maybe not exactly expressing the inexpressible, but it does bring us to awareness of the inexpressible.
