Entering Sappho is an engage-ment with desperate, indulgent, and condescending nostalgia. It documents a wish for this special kind of small-town life.

Sometimes when I wash the dishes, I am seized by the notion that I can attain some kind of transcendent absolute, will have brushed my scrubby against a joyful, radiant beauty if I can just clean every speck, every burnt skirmish from the surface of the pots and pans.

My poetry cannot exist without the confines of colonialism still bearing down on me that has kicked my ancestors so hard in the past that future children fell. My poetry punches people in the guts.

It’s rare that the initial draft of a poem matches my vision of what its potential. It takes time to either carve away at it to get to its essence, or to slowly unpack and add layers of sensory imagery and meaning—or both simultaneously.

This curious empathy leads to an emotion of form, but not without awkward pauses and stumbles, a slapstick which all the while suggests a particularity of duration, occasionally melody.

Poetry for me is the literary form closest to living, to breathing. Poems may arise directly from dreams, revery, witnessing: all we need do is articulate the moment, and others may enter in, share the experience.

I came to poetry as an Africadian (African-Nova Scotian) kid trying to write songs. In fact, it was July 1, 1975, when I decided to write four songs per day…

I’m thinking about sentences, I’m thinking about the prose poem, I’m thinking about friends and social concerns and civil rights and the ecological precipice; our small children go rushing past.

Both my written and visual work investigate the representation of Black people across the Canadian cultural landscape. My goal is to unpack mechanisms of power and systemic oppression…