Runner Up: The Kids
There was a river with many stones in it. Grey stones. And almost as many people as there were stones. We were all crossing the river. It was not deep, and a woman carried me across in her arms.
Issue 47: Fall 2019
Fiction Prize
Winner: Man and His World
I spent two years in law school, 1965 and 1966. Both years, there was a boy named Étienne in the class.
Poetry Prize
Runner Up: Red-Shafted Northern Flicker
earth flings/ vowels of surprise/ through my throat
Winner: You Were Found in the Belly of a Deer Once
Abraded, but clean. Someone cut you out, your face/ purple, as if a panic of blood rioted there.
Fiction
My Mother Was a Girl Teen in the 1970s
Earl Park New Jersey. Right next to Buena pronounced B-YEW-N-A 40-minute drive to Philly seven-minute walk to King’s Department Store yellow turtleneck scrunched-up yellow socks yellow room.
Poetry
Arrow
Toxin in the air / Put your dukes up
Essays
finding safety
When my friend Frank, a member of the organizing team of this year’s Halifax Dyke and Trans Rally, hit up my DMs to ask if I would be interested in speaking at the Rally, I scoffed and wrote, Lol absolutely fucking not.
Who Could Have Lived
It isn’t my neighbourhood. It isn’t my car, either, but I seem to be driving it, my slick hands slipping on the steering wheel of this borrowed vehicle that carries me in such a protected fashion through my city, the car’s gleaming metal skin between myself and the people who like to lurch their legs right in front of traffic on Main Street, as if to say a human body should be value enough to stop two tons of gasoline-powered steel.
Interviews
“I Give the Muse Office Hours”: An Interview with Barry Dempster
Barry Dempster began his writing life as a teenager in Scarborough, with little in his background to support any literary inclinations, and at a time when the teaching of creative writing was rare in Canada.
“Thinking outside the coffin”: An Interview with Dr. Dorisa Costello about the good, the bad, and the endlessly transformative creatures of the night
Dr. Dorisa Costello has a long history with vampires, both personally and professionally. Her doctoral thesis combined critical and creative perspectives to examine fragmentation and non-linear narrative, Victorian prosopopoeic poetry, identity, and mental and physical illness.
Reviews
“the rougarou kept the community in its circle”: Review of Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild
Is there joy—and can one find it—within a spatial and psychological circle, an enclosure separating one from their loved ones?
The Terrifying Self-Awareness of the Siren: A Review of All Day I Dream About Sirens by Domenica Martinello
This past summer, when Disney cast a Black girl to lead an upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, the Internet had a hot second of mind loss. The storm of resistance to the very idea of Halle Bailey as the fictional Ariel showed just how deeply mythological figures are possessed by collective psyches, and how the biases and financial aims of Western media shape their contemporary representation.
Review of Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Amber Dawn’s Sodom Road Exit
The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai and Sodom Road Exit by Amber Dawn are novels tangled up in old worlds—worlds that the characters have to leave; that are still writhing inside of them; that they return to, shifting, never having fit.
