Jernigan Amanda - Best Canadian poetry, 2019

Best Canadian Poetry

2019

GUEST EDITOR: Rob Taylor
SERIES EDITOR: Anita Lahey
ADVISORY EDITOR: Amanda Jernigan

biblioasis

windsor, ontario

Copyright the contributors, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

First Edition

ISBN 978-1-77196-330-5 (Trade Paper)

ISBN 978-1-77196-331-2 (ebook)

Series editor: Anita Lahey

Guest editor: Rob Taylor

Advisory editor: Amanda Jernigan

Managing editor: Heather Wood

Consulting editor: Molly Peacock

Editors-at-large: Michael Fraser, Laboni Islam, Fiona Tinwei Lam

Copy-editor: Emily Donaldson

Cover and text design: Gordon Robertson

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.

Foreword
Anita Lahey

Waving and Becoming Larger
Amanda Jernigan

A String of Devotions
Rob Taylor

Above Picasso and his Musings
Kevin Spenst

After Lorne
Julie Bruck

Anishnaabemowin
Katherena Vermette

Bells
Gary Barwin

Biscuit Factory
Marilyn Bowering

Blueboy
Beth Follett

the breast for sappiness
Claudia Coutu Radmore

Conspiracy of Love
Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Cree dictionary
Dallas Hunt

Crystals
Ellie Sawatzky

CXXVII
Sonnet LAbb

DIIIIIIIIID IIIIITTTT HAPPEN
Colleen Baran

Doing the Death We Call Pretty
Stevie Howell

Don
Daniel Scott Tysdal

Elgin County
Annick MacAskill

Flattering
Mallory Tater

Fuji, Baby
Laura Matwichuk

How Soon, How Likely, How Severe
Shaun Robinson

Ibu Saudara Isteri
Tess Liem

Kill Poem
William Vallires

Letter to Atleo from the Old Shell Station near Buckhorn
D.A. Lockhart

The Lipstick Effect
Alexandra Oliver

Marketplace
Christopher Evans

My Mother Gave Me
Souvankham Thammavongsa

Nancy Creek: End of Summer
Danielle Hubbard

O sea of troubles we did not take arms against
Adebe DeRango-Adem

Ode to the Cockroach
Cara Waterfall

Open
Russell Thornton

Parthenope and Virgil
Domenica Martinello

pimhkn
Jessie Loyer

Poem in Which I Remember Mary Taylor on an April Tuesday
Sue Chenette

Police horse makes escape down Fort York Boulevard
David Seymour

r u ok
Katie McGarry

The Reader
Catherine Hunter

Red-Eye
Sadiqa de Meijer

The Second Fall
Chelsea Coupal

A Slender Presence
A.F. Moritz

Snapshot of My Father
Alycia Pirmohamed

Some Stylized Facts
Jimmy McInnes

Steep Steps Toward Home
Douglas Walbourne-Gough

Sundays, Mornings
Gillian Wigmore

Taxi Drivers Therapy
Yusuf Saadi

The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve
Billy-Ray Belcourt

Train Wrecks, Rare Fossils
Marion Quednau

Transition
Ali Blythe

Tu me manques
Ian Williams

Under Construction
Kayla Czaga

Union Station
Ben Ladouceur

Wasp
Sara Cassidy

Witch hunt
Rebecca Salazar

Foreword

This, the twelfth edition of Best Canadian Poetry , is taking shape in the tidiest study I have ever occupied. Our house is for sale, and accordingly arranged and scoured down to its sturdy old bones so that, like a poem an author has lovingly crafted and revised, it is in a condition to be shown.

My neat metaphorclean house, polished poem, each pre pared for presentationbreaks down once you start compar ing the cost of houses with the price tags on poems. But lets not go that route. Set aside the horrors of contemporary real estate and our disconcerting economic times. You will get there soon enough, when you hit Christopher Evans poem Marketplace later in this book, or, say, Kayla Czagas Under Construction.

Lets consider, instead, how a poem makes a kind of home. A home for the psyche, the heart, the imagination, for the music hidden far away within us that the poet has stopped still long enough to hear, and then, with utmost care, to score.

One of the few items remaining on my deskusually awash in overstuffed file folders, notepads, paper clips, pens, works-in-progress, and lists (so many lists!)is a stack of poems: fifty poems, each penned by a different author. These are the poems that were selected by Rob Taylor, guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 , to appear in this anthology. And its here, among these poems, in their idiosyncratic rhythms and their deliberately chosen words, that I have found a sense of home while my familys place in the physical world is in flux.

A poem is a home in the way that the mind and spirit of the speaker in A.F. Moritzs A Slender Presence is a home for Vergil; in the way that the oven of cementthe crowds half naked in the speakers modern world contain Vergils Rome: Here, as there, white-grey slabs / milled from nature / clad every side except the sky / and redouble the sun.... The suns heatintensified by its beating down on those buildings, steaming up the lines of Moritzs poem, fairly melting themis an ancient heat: we live in it, it lives in us.

Words give off that kind of heat.

Id like to invite you into this house of poems, my temporary home, my refuge: the place held up with solid poetic lines that becomes, once you enter it, more real than the room in which you are sitting.

Its a strange place to inhabit, this stack of verse on my desk. Its comprised of printouts of poems scanned from the pages of magazines. Some of the lines of poetry curve, revealing the curve of the journal as it lay open, partly flattened, on the scanner. Chunks of stanzas are faint or blurred. Page edges caught by the scanners light frame parts of the poems. Journal titles and volume numbers or dates are sometimes caught within the boundaries of the scan, sometimes not. Likewise page numbers.

I copied several of the poems from online journals and pasted them into text documents on my laptop, then printed them, so they have become bare verses on paper, revealing no hint of where they were originally published, and thus exuding a faint aura of having been shoplifted.

Others were printed straight from webpage snapshots and contain remnants of clickable menus. Still others are printouts of smartphone photos; their grainy backgrounds all but obscure the text.