Photo credit: Tam Lan TruongInterview by Matthew Rettino Mirabel (whose real name is Avleen K. Mokha) is a 24-year-old award-winning poet originally from Mumbai, India, currently studying speech-language pathology at McGill University. I came to know her well during...
Former PRISM poetry editor Rob Taylor sat down with poet, author and former journey carpenter Kate Braid to discuss her newly released poetry collection “Elemental” (Caitlin Press, 2018).
I spoke with you briefly for PRISM international back in 2014, and at that point you noted: “Looking over my recent poems, I’m a bit alarmed to find I’m writing more personally, neither behind the mask of another or out of my experience as a carpenter – which also became a sort of persona.” True to that statement, Elemental, though certainly structured around “elemental” themes, feels in other ways like your first “general” collection (your past collections having channeled Glenn Gould and Emily Carr, among others). In that sense it feels almost like you’re living the traditional poet’s trajectory in reverse (the early, more personal/general collection, followed by themed “projects”). Do you think of this book in those terms (“general” and personal), and do you think it represents a larger shift in your preoccupations/energies as a writer? Did “removing the masks” allow you to access some more “elemental” part of yourself?
Chelene Knight’s debut poetry collection, Braided Skin, was celebrated as a vibrant telling of mixed ethnicity and urban childhood poverty. Her sophomore book Dear Current Occupant, a creative nonfiction memoir, is a nuanced account of growing up in Vancouver’s Downtown...
Interview by Selina Boan. Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, the first time the prize has been awarded to a debut collection. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of...
Former PRISM poetry editor (2014-15) Rob Taylor sat down with recent City of Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist Patricia Young to discuss her nominated poetry collection (and ninth, total) “Short Takes on the Apocalypse“. Chagall’s Lovers – Patricia Young ...
Interview by Shazia Hafiz Ramji Jay Gamble is a poet, academic, and author of the long poem, Book of Knots, recently published by BookThug. The publisher says that Gamble’s poems “seek to engage with life’s failure, by building ‘a...
Interview by Anita Bedell Eden Robinson is the author of the novels Monkey Beach (2000), Blood Sports (2006) and Son of a Trickster (Penguin Random House, 2017), the short story collection Traplines (1995), and Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2011),...
Interview by A. Niamh Higgins Laura Farina always seems to be in the right place at the right time. The Ottawa-born poet, now based in Vancouver, published her first collection, This Woman Alphabetical (49th Shelf, 2005), at age twenty-four—the kind...
Former PRISM poetry editor (2014-15) Rob Taylor sat down with 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize judge Tim Bowling to discuss his twelfth poetry collection “The Duende of Tetherball“. Coyote – Tim Bowling Shoved its head heraldic through the autumn foliage fifty...