Abstract: This text takes as its starting point Laurie Ricou’s
The Arbutus/Madrone Files (2002) in order to recount both a personal and professional return to the Pacific Northwest. In part a quest for today’s “Cascadia” and for answers to questions about cross-border regions and the emergence of a shared regional consciousness, what follows is also a Ricou-inspired dialogue with Pacific Northwest writers and writing, their triumphs and their shadows (Dillard, Doig, Guterson, Keeble, Kishkan, Lynch, Marlatt). Honouring Ricou’s unique and invaluable contribution to Canadian letters has meant following his lead, engaging in creative cross-bordering, pursuing the interdependence of coastal and interior ecologies and continually learning from his profound sense of place.
To read the full article online, visit our OJS site.
Abstract: In this paper, I query what the poetry and poetics of chronic illness might offer now, in the time of a pandemic. In doing so, I take up Hillary Gravendyk’s “chronic poetics” which brims with generative potential especially when focused on the poetry and poetics of chronic illness which presents unique insights—not to mention poetic forms—into how to live with uncertainty. Specifically, I turn to Fionncara MacEoin’s
Not the First Thing I’ve Missed (2014), Anna Swanson’s
The Nights Also (2010), and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s
Bodymap (2015) in order to illustrate why chronic illness is a poignant site of living in precarity but also in “collective affinity” (Kafer 10). The poetry and poetics of chronic illness provides a crucial site to explore feminist, queer and crip experience in giving voice to the intensity of living with mind, body, and/or bodymind unpredictability.
To read the full article online, visit our OJS site
Abstract: Charles Heavysege's poetry reveals that he looked at both life and literature through the typological lens of Christian history. As an urban, working-class skilled tradesman with an evangelical upbringing and education, Heavysege sought an identity through his writing that would allow him to justify his ambition to be a recognized, respected, and financially successful poet without forfeiting piety and its reward: salvation.
To read the full article online, visit our OJS site