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Poetry Friday: "How to Trim Squid" by Craig Poile

For no discernible reason, this week's Poetry Friday concerns cephalopods and cooking.

Just the mood we're in this week.

Without further ado, from the collection True Concessions — winner of the 2010 Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry — here is Craig Poile's weirdly wonderful poem, "How to Trim Squid."

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Pauline Holdstock's THE HUNTER AND THE WILD GIRL, now in paperback!

Out in stores now, the paperback edition of Pauline Holdstock's acclaimed, award-winning novel The Hunter and the Wild Girl! Don't miss out on reading the novel The National Post called "a thorough examination of what, exactly, it means to be a person," and The Globe & Mail hailed as "resonant and troubling, like all good fairy tales."

EXCERPT

WITH A SHRIEK of splintering boards, the girl breaks into daylight and stands blinded, panting, sucking air as if it were a great hot soup, her chest heaving. Three breaths, harsh as the scrape of wood on stone — and then she is running, naked limbs a hieroglyph in motion across the scrubby field beside the house she had not known was there, through the alarmed and protesting sheep, running, leaping, until she reaches the cloudy cover of an olive grove where she draws a breath and, breakneck, reckless, races on. Desperate, unfledged harpy. No destination, no thought, only ‘away.’ Away from the darkness of the hovel and its reek, away from the old man and his snarling dog.

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Poetry Friday: "Aubade Photoshop" by Jeff Latosik

Wikipedia (the basis for all known facts in the universe) defines an aubade as: "a morning love song (as opposed to a serenade, which is in the evening), or a song or poem about lovers separating at dawn." It's a lovely sentiment, and deserves a poem as lovely as today's entry of Poetry Friday, Jeff Latosik's "Aubade Photoshop" (from his collection Safely Home Pacific Western).
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Poetry Friday: "West End, Halifax" by Brian Bartlett

The Watchmaker's Table, Brian Bartlett We love to travel, but sometimes we can't get away as far as we like. So, for today's Poetry Friday, we'll take a quick haiku-heavy jaunt via Brian Bartlett to "West End, Halifax" (from his collection The Watchmaker's Table).

Reached via social media, Brian had this to say about the work behind his poem:

This haiku montage is one of three in The Watchmaker's Table. Stitching haiku together to create long poems (which I've compared to collages or mosaics) became so much a part of my writing a dozen or so years ago that I went on to publish a whole book of seven more montages, Potato Blossom Road (Ekstasis Editions, 2013). That book also includes an essay, "Haikuing," which details my reflections on this popular but often misunderstood, misrepresented mode of writing—which I've also experienced as a way of thinking, seeing and hearing.


West End, Halifax

In this moist corner 
    of a used-book store
a lone mushroom sprouts


                                                                        Two giant zucchini
                                                                            by a grinning girl’s ears –
                                                                        green parenthesis


He holds high his rolled-up
    Yoga mat, fending off
a crow diving close


                                                                        The blackout lasts
                                                                            one second – the neighbourhood 
                                                                        blinks – glimpse of Zilch


Where Dublin St. meets
    London St., a soaked atlas
falls apart in grass


                                                                        Behemoth tree-trimmer spits
                                                                             limbs into its gut –
                                                                        noisiest eater around


Garbage night, one hopeful
     sound in the dark – 
bottle-scavengers’ bag clink


                                                                        From under ice
                                                                             in a mid-winter thaw
                                                                        a worm crawls, earth’s colour


A sort of grace –
     a falling icicle strikes
his foot, not his eye



                                                                          Blizzard-buried,
                                                                            a locked bicycle’s shrunken
                                                                          to its red reflector


A maple wingseed
     stays stuck to a skate blade
crisscrossing a rink


                                                                        Two bootprints frozen
                                                                             in sidewalk ice, one pointing
                                                                        down the street, one up

 
Through twelve months
     a scarecrow on a porch gives
each season the same scowl



                                                                      Oh for X-rays to show
                                                                            all the trees roots holding
                                                                        these streets together

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The MoMA Presents: Aloha Wanderwell, The World’s Most Widely Traveled Woman

This Saturday, January 27, 2018, an illustrated lecture about Aloha Wanderwell’s dramatic life and fabulous adventures will happen in New York at the Museum of Modern Arts’ international festival of newly preserved films, “To Save and Project.”
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