CONCRETE & RIVER

Annick MacAskill writes: “Banff” is a poem from my latest collection, Murumurations , which just came out with Gaspereau Press. The book is a collection of queer love poetry that also explores the limits and intersections of sound, language, meaning, communication, noise, and song. I’ve long been fascinated with love poetry. As I wrote this book, I was conscious of how I did (and did not) fit in with many of the (male, straight) models that have defined this tradition. I’m grateful for writers like Carol Ann Duffy, Audre Lorde, Anne Carson, Arleen Paré, and others who have given us their own takes on the established mode of the love lyric. I had planned to launch Murmurations in Halifax on Thursday, May 14, at Café Lara. I had asked fellow Halifax poets Jaime Forsythe, Nanci Lee, and Sam Sternberg to read with me. I hope to re-schedule this event at some point in the future. Annick MacAskill BANFF Clouds trip over mountains, lend shadows to our hands, ungloved—

This is the fourth and last in a Poetry Month feature series with Sarah Venart, who walks us through the revisions history of some of the poems from her forthcoming book, I Am the Big Heart (Brick 2020) . Comments and questions are welcome . What do you see changing as the poem develops? Sarah Venart EPIPHANY Here I am, with one hour to find it. Here I am in this tenth month, the peeler of pears,  the slicer of hotdogs, cutting them into strips  smaller than a child’s windpipe.  Here’s my apologetic smile, accepted by the daycare  in return for my children. So what is there to find  in one hour on my desk’s shallow surface?  I’ve mislaid all of it somewhere among  my mind’s tiny grey flags, in the millions of scraps  piling up. I left it behind in the dark bleeding gums  of the dog that I loved, watching her clench yet another rock  from the tide. That was twelve years ago.  What was she looking for?  What if she’d stopped looking? Metaphors

Eavan Boland WHAT LANGUAGE DID The evening was the same as any other. I came out and stood on the step. The suburb was closed in the weather of an early spring and the shallow tips and washed-out yellows of narcissi resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops. I stood there and felt melancholy of growing older in such a season, when all I could be certain of was simply in this time of fragrance and refrain, whatever else might flower before the fruit, and be renewed, I would not. Not again. A car splashed by in the twilight. Peat smoke stayed in the windless air overhead and I might have missed it: a presence. Suddenly. In the very place where I would stand in other dusks, and look to pick out my child from the distance, was a shepherdess, her smile cracked, her arm injured from the mantelpieces and pastorals where she posed with her crook. Then I turned and saw in the spaces of the night sky constellations appear, one by one, over roof-tops and house

Seth Michelson writes: Liliana Ancalao (b.1961) is a leading Mapuche poet. She was born in Puel Mapu, also known as the Republic of Argentina. The Mapuche have traversed the southern third of South America for some twenty-thousand years, including their vital travel along an Andean route that would be appropriated and formalized by Argentina into National Route 40. Liliana's poem reflects on this transformation. Women of the Big Sky is the first single-author book of poetry in English-language translation by a female Mapuche writer from territorial Argentina. (Note: Mapuzungun words and phrases in Seth Michelson's English translation are glossed below) a photo on route 40 it no longer runs from the Senguerr River to the Genoa no matter how much mate and talk we pour over when walking the route pu lamngen it once led us to Copawe’s brown ash another time the white wind didn’t recognize us this time we returned splitting fog always strainin