Amy LeBlanc
Biography
Amy LeBlanc is Managing Editor at Canthius and a PhD student in English at the University of Calgary. Amy's debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, was published with Gordon Hill Press in March 2020 and was long listed for the 2021 ReLit Award and selected as a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Her novella, Unlocking, was published by the UCalgary Press in June 2021 and is a finalist for the Trade Fiction Book of the Year through the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, Arc, Canadian Literature, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry— most recently, “Undead Juliet at the Museum" which was published with ZED Press in August 2021. Amy is a recipient of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and a CGS-D Award for her doctoral research into fictional representations of chronic illness and gothic spaces. She is a 2022 Killam Laureate.
Poetics Statement
“As a poet, scholar, and fiction writer, I write most often about hauntings— by this I mean the imprint that is left behind by an experience, a person, or a place. I am constantly excited by moments when genres intersect or cross over to create something new. I am also a writer living with an autoimmune disease and I am learning to navigate how to write about being ill in ways that are generative and meaningful. In my academic work, I research the intersections of Gothic spaces (like haunted houses) and the ill body, but in my creative work, I try to find new ways to write the body that refuses ‘to be’ in the ways I want or that resides in an in-between space. In my mind, the best poems tackle this in-between space head on through their metaphors and their visceral language— this can turn a poem into a home for an unruly body (for example, autoimmunity occurs when the self fails to recognize itself and the body’s own immune system attacks. It’s hard to write about autoimmunity without relying on military metaphors, but I am trying). By wearing both creative and academic hats, I rely on the perception of poetry as praxis, which one of my favourite scholars, Ryan Petteway, believes is intricately connected with health and health outcomes. He writes “a core [...] purpose of qualitative work is to uncover/reveal insights that can help us imagine new possibilities, new questions, new answers, and new futures. Sounds like poetry to me [...] it is also to appreciate poetry as a more expressly humanized and inclusive format of critical public health scholarship: Papers are not superior to poems. Why say in 5,000 words (including references and tables) what can be said in five stanzas?” For me, the express humanization of poetry also takes the form of community— I value my academic and creative communities above all else and I try to give as much as I take because I have benefited hugely from community support. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Spatial Awareness
The kitchen window on the left
with the sink in front—
you could draw an outline in chalk
on the cushioned tile
(with: arms, pinky toes, appendix,
intestines, hemoglobin, ferritin)
but it may not help in the end.
Turn the room on its side
to shift your heart into a new
position one where blood
either pools or flows
like a river that runs both
ways. With the room in
view, move the chair a fraction
to the right. This will place you
closer to the sun, nearer
the airport,
closer to tenderness.
On second thought, draw
the body in chalk on the floor
but make it your own. Solid lines
for impenetrable membranes,
dashes for DNA, stars for
cytokines. A space
on the left for a heart that pumps
blood toward an airplane
moving overhead.
rutting season
This could be a good place like moss on barren ground,
like the stages of grief, moss between button holes, moss
a tincture of amber velvet amid incisors, or a cot death
to keep intimate and clean where milk teeth sit
his bouquet of antlers like foxes on fence posts
turning into rabbit punches, and the antlers grow
petals and panties bunch until they are too weighty to lift.
