spring 2017
Table of Contents
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Prayer For Our Past Selves
Esther McPhee
A Coke and a KitKat
Spenser Smith
Dear Miss Parker
Dear Mama
Chelene Knight
Inside My House
Gleaning Stones
Onjana Yawnghwe
from Electric Garden
Amanda Earl
We Could Have Called Him Joe, We Didn't
Juliane Okot Bitek
Aztlan Travels Emiliano Sepulveda
Romeo, Romeo, WTF?
P.C. Vandall
Singing in Dark Times
Bhaswati Ghosh
The Lady or the Tiger? Michelle Brooks
Constantly Looking, Admitting Nothing
Paul Douglas McNeill II
from Glossary of Musical Terms rob mclennan
First Loves in Brevoort Park
Body Analysis
Erin Hiebert
Red Sarongs
Clementine
Chelsea Comeau
box cars paper plates annie ross
Author Biographies
Author Biographies
Alexandra is a New Yorker living in Canada, a Medieval Studies PhD student at the University of Toronto, and a former journalist.
Daniel Barnum is a writer and translator based in Philadelphia. He has received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets and the Colgate Writers' Conference. His work is forthcoming from or appears in Ninth Letter, Title, The Matador Review, Lullwater Review, and The White Elephant. Find him here: danielbarnum.weebly.com
Juliane Okot Bitek is a Vancouver poet. 100 Days, her debut collection commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, published by University of Alberta Press, 2016. This issue's poem is from Stories from the Dry Season, recalled, forgotten, and imagined narratives of formerly abducted women from the Lord's Resistance Army.
Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, her favorite city.
Chelsea Comeau is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Claremont Review, BUST magazine, and CV2. In 2015, she was the Canadian winner of the Leaf Press chapbook contest. She was the second prize winner for poetry in the 2016 Vancouver Writers Festival Contest.
Alyssa Cooper, a Canadian writer and artist, currently lives in Kingston, Ontario with her partner, two cats, and a Boston Terrier. First published in 2008, she has since authored three novels, a short story collection, and a poetry collection. She is currently working on a novel, Twisted, and a poetry collection, Fevered Ramblings.
Amanda Earl's books/chapbooks include Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014), I Owe Saint Hildegard The Light (unarmed press, 2016), Queen Christina (Ghost City Press, 2016), & firstwalks of the year (In/Words Press, 2016). More info is available at AmandaEarl.com. Connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle
Beaton Galafa is a Malawian writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, a keen reader of all works of literature, and a student in the Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics program at Chancellor College, University of Malawi.
Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Stonecoast Review, Open Road Review, Warscapes, Pithead Chapel, Coldnoon Travel Poetics, and Humanities Underground. Bhaswati lives in Ontario, Canada with her husband. Her website: www.bhaswatighosh.com.
Originally from Saskatoon, Erin Hiebert is a recent graduate of UBC Okanagan's creative writing BA program. Her first chapbook, Women at Work On Women, was published in 2016. She currently lives in Kelowna and is working on her first full-length collection.
Sugar le Fae (aka Zach Matteson) is a prize-winning poet, a translator, teacher, photographer, songwriter, and Radical Faerie. His poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous literary journals in Canada and the U.S., including Plenitude, Lemon Hound, and Eleven Eleven. Sugar received an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.
Robert Lietz's poems appear in numerous journals, including Antioch Review, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah, and in eight published collections, including The Lindbergh Half-century and After Business in the West. Lietz spends time taking, post-processing, and printing photographs examining their relationship to poems he's made and is exploring.
Chelene Knight was born in Vancouver and is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio 2013. Chelene is currently the Managing Editor at Room magazine. Braided Skin is her first book and her second book, Dear Current Occupant, is forthcoming with BookThug in 2018. She is currently working on a novel.
mclennan won the John Newlove Poetry Award (2010), the Ottawa Arts Council Mid-Career Award (2014), and inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour (2016). In fall 2015, he was named “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and is a regular contributor to Drunken Boat and Ploughshares.
Paul Douglas McNeill II is a writer and English professor at a tribal college, living in the Arctic Circle of Alaska. His poem “Stop Asking: Did This Really Happen?” was published in Off the Coast (summer 2014), and “I Was Only Seven” was featured in the anthology Monsters Amongst Us (Oscillate Wildly Press).
Esther McPhee is a writer, magic-maker, and community organizer, who grew up on Stó:lō land and now lives on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land (Vancouver). They earned an MFA in creative writing from UBC. Their writing has appeared across North America and they're one half of the organizing team behind REVERB: A Queer Reading Series.
Jeff McRae teaches creative writing and literature at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His poetry has appeared in Antioch Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.
A MFA student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Guelph-Humber, Lindsay Miles was shortlisted in 2014 for Briarpatch Magazine’s creative nonfiction contest. Her work has appeared in Megaphone Magazine, Self Care for Skeptics, and Emerge, an anthology for emerging writers at Simon Fraser University. Lindsay lives in Toronto.
Phuong Nguyen completed her Bachelor of Fine Art at OCAD U in 2014, and currently practices art-making in Toronto. Her ongoing body of work explores the contemporary identity of the Asian Canadian/American in the contexts of mass production, popular culture, colonialism, and orientalism.
annie ross is a Canadian painter and poet.
Emiliano Sepulveda is a visual artist of Mexican descent who is local to Vancouver. His work draws from a wide range of research into Indigenous and Chicanx (Mexican-American) activism, Aztec epistemology, science-fiction, poetry, as well as the aesthetics of protest camps.
Spenser Smith is a writer, editor, and photographer studying at Vancouver Island University. He is the managing editor of Portal and the web editor of The Navigator. His work has been featured in (parenthetical), The Quilliad, text, Potluck Mag, and elsewhere. He was awarded the 2016 Pat Bevan poetry scholarship.
Taylor Supplee is an MFA candidate at Columbia University in New York. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, SLAB, Revolver, and elsewhere. He writes poetry to guess at unanswerable questions.
Pamela Vandall is the author of poetry collections: Something from Nothing (Writing Knights Press), Woodwinds (Lipstick Press), and Matrimonial Cake (Red Dashboard). Her next book of poetry debuts in fall 2017 with Oolichan Books. When Pamela is not writing, she's sleeping. She believes sleep is death without the commitment.
Onjana Yawnghwe is a Shan-Canadian living in Vancouver. Her first poetry book, Fragments, Desire is forthcoming with Oolichan Books in 2017. She works as a nurse in mental health.