Hollay Ghadery
Alt text: Ghadery has long, dark hair and is smiling at the camera. She is in a warmly outdoor setting surrounded by vibrant yellow-green foliage. A blue sky can be seen. She wears a cozy beige jacket over a floral shirt.
Biography
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race mental health (Guernica Editions, 2021) and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box, was released by Radiant Press in 2023. The title poem won The New Quarterly’s 2022 Ocassional Verse Award. Hollay’s collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com.
Poetics Statement
“I feel strongly about creating art that stands against the misinformation surrounding monolithic identities, mental illness, and heteronormativity, which are often seen through myopic lenses of certain attributes, values, and behaviours. I believe in striving to show how we are closer to each other than the powers that try to divide us. I also feel strongly about writing about and from rural spaces and shattering the perceived barrier between ourselves and our natural world in hopes to foster compassion and promote climate action.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Walk it Off
Not doing this again—
the sky fat with lakes,
and lakes fat with skies; hawk parallax mimicking
a sky fat with lakes and
lunatic ivy in my veins mimicking the plummet of stars
down to the lake, a fistful of obsidian ivy
a hawk mimicking
heart parallax.
Apeirophobia
You’ll learn about galaxies. Of
how you have infinite life to live. How
old you are by observing the energy
you radiate into space. In space
you’ll require no air or substance
to carry you along, but along
you’ll go, a compressed calm of calm
compression, radiating through emptiness
though emptiness is a dream for a swollen
universe and the universe
is a future that’s dying of
loneliness, because you prefer
the past—it’s predictable, and
in it you have infinite life to live.
Cosmic Script
Your daughter knows darkness
is just the absence of light,
and flowers drink sunlight and rain to grow. She knows
her dog’s nose print
is unlike any other dog’s nose
in the whole world
and that a newborn’s skin is thin
as rice paper.
But she doesn’t know what happens when she dies,
and it keeps her up at night, her stomach pinned
in a rollercoaster drop.
Her thoughts,
a hundred rubber balls
bouncing
around a rubber room.
A natural extension of your body, she
finds you
in darkness and climbs into your bed. You tell her about comets: their tails spanning star systems.
Their bodies huge snowballs of gas,
dust
and ice that orbit the sun,
pulled back from their aphelion orbits millions of years
after they set out.
Who knows where they go.
Who knows what they see.
It could be anything.
It’s okay not to know for sure.
You say that, but you’re
not so sure,
yourself.
