Arc Poetry
19 FOLLOWERS
At Arc, we find the brave new voices. We feature poetry that is woozy, cunning, shearing, and wildlife, and prose that offers new perspectives on the verse you thought you knew.
Arc Poetry
1M ago
I went there once, nose first, on a date with a high school teacher I’d met at a communist bookstore— revolutionary communist, to be clear— to see 12 Years a Slave. I don’t remember the neon yellow Sunshine above the black marquee or the mostly-black graffiti splayed out on the urban beige brick or the ..read more
Arc Poetry
2M ago
“make a map,” she says and already i am lost. i understand what's being asked; i don't know if it's possible to make a map of feelings. diligently i assemble a list of parts: title, scale, orientation, legend, border. it's a representation of something or of some place in relation to some other thing or ..read more
Arc Poetry
2M ago
It is often said that an essential quality of poetic writing is its immunity to translation. As Dante wrote in his Convivio: “nothing harmonized according to the rules of poetry can be translated from its native tongue into another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony.” Dominique Bernier-Cormier would, I think, agree with Dante’s image ..read more
Arc Poetry
2M ago
“Serious art is born from serious play.” This quote from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way epitomizes the poems in Dennis Cooley’s latest book, body works, in which he continues to write with a playfulness that has produced a rich oeuvre of poetry spanning the last five decades. Built from the machinery of the body—its clicks ..read more
Arc Poetry
2M ago
you speak to me in skylines| the techno of concrete walls| | cacophonies of light & noise collide| with glass & | asphalt | | instead of ocean chants | & mountains. the wind can’t tell the | difference. it scales | the heights of scrapers| |shoves us around the corner of Burrard| |and Hastings ..read more
Arc Poetry
3M ago
You set the board, a field of alternating black and white squares. Multi-level, like Star Trek, to consider time, space, all dimensions. Bolt to the boundary of the table, stay in the lines, ignore the teeth menacing at the edges of my field of vision. Shift to the rook, you circle, gaze down with one ..read more
Arc Poetry
4M ago
Water flows throughout Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s remarkable Fire Cider Rain, with the book’s four sections, titled Evaporate, Condensate, Precipitate and Collect. Water features in many poem titles and in the poems themselves, ranging from omnipresent ocean to storm to “water on tile” (“Seamelt II”). Fire cider, a spice-infused tonic, comes down as precipitation. In ..read more
Arc Poetry
5M ago
Kim Fahner’s Emptying the Ocean is a feminist narrative modelled on Irish immram tales traditionally featuring men. Men in immram tales are often expelled from monastic communities for violent acts like rape or murder. Their chance at redemption comes through pilgrimage across the ocean to distant islands, whereas women banished to sea are often being ..read more
Arc Poetry
5M ago
Popping tar bubbles in the middle of the road on the cul-de-sac in summer. Lava cakes, molten licorice stucky hillocks, overburst of what lies, lives beneath. My four-year-old thumbnail makes crosses in each, pressing for tension, testing for what is at the ready, ripe. I move in. Ear to asphalt, I connect to the wellspring ..read more
Arc Poetry
5M ago
Life is made up of endless quantities of fragments that light up our own personal auras like the stars in the night sky. Each star is a shining beacon of what it means to be alive: the people we meet, the joys and sorrows we encounter, the tragedies—not to mention the intense fragility of it ..read more