Issue 57: Spring 2022

Fiction

The Death Doula and the Snake

We carry the slithering beast through a carnival of trees. Its paper-mâché length curves electric around my waist.

From a Great Distance

At the beginning of this story I felt slow and sad and stuck, like I was repeatedly catching in my own throat, a balled up obstruction retching endlessly in the corner of my life.

Jasmine’s Brows and Cuts

Jasmine doesn’t do advertisements. Since her early 20s, she’s been staunchly anti-capitalist, believes ads are, at best, meaningless propaganda that only serve the ruling class.
Poetry

“Blood Oranges” and “the sugar of knowing”

The moon is gorgeous tonight, full/ of necromancers and dead poets,

After the Boats

Make Good

“A Dark Told Me (The Empty Ones)" and “Pandemia"

Essays

How to Heal a Sunburn

Once, I fell asleep on a beach. It was the summer before my final year of college, and I hated myself. I got a sunburn.

For No Other Reason Than To Teach You About Islam

At a bar after class. Tall candlesticks run down the centre of the table. The flames make the students sweat.
Interviews

“There Was Fear and Faith”: An Interview with Sanna Wani

Kashmiri poet Sanna Wani and I began conversing over Twitter during the summer of 2020, but I had been aware of her work since reading her poem “Here is Longing” in Hobart in December 2019.

“On Fighting ASL Stigma and Amplifying Deaf Voices”: An Interview with Sara Nović

Sara Nović’s latest novel True Biz is an exposé of the marginalization of the Deaf community borne out of ASL stigma and abuse of power by the hearing world.

“On Poetic Origins, Creative Space, and Writing Across Genres”: An Interview with Gillian Sze

When I first heard about Gillian Sze’s new collection Quiet Night Think (ECW April 2022) in late 2021, I felt immediately drawn to the book because its title references one of the world’s most widely taught and read Chinese poems, written by the Tang dynasty Chinese poet Li Bai.
Reviews

There is pain, even in relief: A review of Therese Estacion’s Phantompains

The back cover of Therese Estacion’s Phantompains notes that she wrote her debut collection “out of necessity” after being hospitalized for a rare bacterial infection, resulting in the loss of “both of her legs below the knees, several fingers, and reproductive organs.”

Tracing the Shadows of Intimacy: Helen Chau Bradley’s Personal Attention Roleplay

I’m writing this review in the middle of self-isolation. My roommate has recently tested positive for COVID-19, and for the past week, we’ve both been sequestered to our respective rooms, wearing masks during short excursions to make food or go to the bathroom.

Vulnerability and Self-Defence: A Review of Aaron Schneider’s What We Think We Know

Aaron Schneider’s debut experimental short fiction collection What We Think We Know explores the vulnerability and emotional well-being of its characters through novel rhetorical strategies such as charts, graphs, reports, lists, taxonomies, interviews, observations, and data analysis.

“Someone is singing on the steep”: Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun

The mountains closest to me, the peaks of the Olympic range across the Salish sea, don’t appear along the horizon every day, not even when I look for them past the cedar and the waves.