We’re at this party looking fish-eyed outside, bricked into each other like a neat little house. Someone shudders with news of their ruptured heartbreak. It’s either 2007 or 2012 and I’m carrying the weight of knowing how this feels. But I don’t want to pour myself into another glass only to be told my suffering tastes the same. And now it’s 2022 and we were 21 a long time ago, sucking in as much of the world’s cooked air as we could before it burnt us. I don’t speak to anyone I used to know. But in my mind, they linger, a twist of limbs and bummed smokes, those perfumed bookkeepers I met in ..read more

A Billiard Hall, Cress Sandwiches, Wallpaper, a Piano Solo Beckett, they say, read his Bible for style, Stendhal the Napoleonic Code. The Ames billiard hall in The Hustler during the first thirty-five minutes. And again in the final scene. Or a slower duration of time during the ball in The Leopard, and in the memory game in Days and Nights in the Forest. Picnics by Monet, Titian, the Elder Bruegel, grand lunches in the Bois de Boulogne with concealed orchestras in a grove, or Ratty with Mole consuming cold chicken ham pickled gherkins french rolls cress sandwiches ginger beer, along their riv ..read more

I describe my woes to my friend, the pro, genius of a plot greater and finer than my own big old garden where everything grows into everything else. Definition, she tells me. That’s what I need. I was defined by a cold place, a time when summer was brief and brilliant. By a house of enough in a neighbourhood of just- and not-enough. Pink petunias and orange marigold, a red rose or two. But here, too much. Too much moneywort invaded by stonecrop inveigled by barrenwort entangled with leopard’s bane. Besotted, greedy, jealous to save every bloom, leaf, for me this more than enough isn’t too muc ..read more

Playground a’squawk. From the south-side street opposite, out for a daytime walk, I first spot his jacket. Like a binary star my son rising pixelated on the far horizon: those bits I own as atmosphere to my core. He continues to not see me, tuned to other kids, scoring diacritics on the utility pole. What is, emptying what was: the edifice I know as lent, soul temporal, inscribing duration, the middle of the end. Whether or not I walk on, I do and I don’t. When I go, he’ll be gone. The post I Pass His School during Lunch first appeared on The Walrus ..read more

Absorbed in deadheading roses peonies and day lilies weeding between the ruffled heads of lettuce, the toppled rhubarb stalks pinching back tomato plants pruning stray branches to let sunlight brighten the garden I ignored an infestation of sawfly larvae on the not-yet-blooming loosestrife until they had made ribbons of the leaves. Isn’t that how it always is? Problems multiply unnoticed in the lea of our preoccupations until they have grown riotous. It’s not that the insects hadn’t left signs— tiny balls of excrement marking their journey— but that I hadn’t focused close enough to see them u ..read more

after Gary Snyder Hop the gondola ride up to Sulphur Mountain and feel your body glide-step through lodgepole pines and spruce. Everything about the world is evergreen. Take a panoramic pic and watch these bare-faced peaks fill silence and take advantage of all the sky they can inhabit. Act surprised whenever bartenders or wait staff reveal they’re Aussies. Nod in agreement when they repeat snowboarding is the meaning of life. We’re all stories tumbling outside ourselves. Trip over to Lake Louise, try to tear your attention away from its glacial aqua waves while you think in simile, each view ..read more

The end is temporary, touch-and-go, torched and resurrected in a circle of ash— up humor, up tenor, upending those who stand in the way— the sender and the spirit marked to replace the recently taken, the displaced citizens left without a host, disembodied frost sucking blood from bone. The post No Host first appeared on The Walrus ..read more

I am trying not to lie to you, trying not to say I am a body that breaks into blossom whenever I see horses, like James Wright famously wrote. I once believed in the psalmic line, which is one way to get out of one’s self; alcohol is another. Some poets use both. I certainly did, until neither worked anymore. Things detached from names can be seen, witnessed, but naming things sates the hunger God’s absence leaves. Poetry is two parts pilgrimage, one part education. The shrines are different for everyone—childhood, the past, the Edenic place, maybe the unthawed snow burying a neighbourhood in ..read more

For one moment we’re held, just so. By a hand that knows us best. As though we’re silk stems. Or hare’s ears in the soft grip of suspense before we are lifted from the magician’s hat. The post And so live ever— first appeared on The Walrus ..read more

In 2018, The Walrus published an excerpt from Jason Guriel’s then forthcoming Forgotten Work, an ambitious verse novel which would eventually appear in 2020—and which the New York Times would declare “unlikely, audacious and ingenious.” Last month, Biblioasis published Guriel’s second verse novel, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles. Set in the same universe as Forgotten Work and composed in rhyming couplets, Guriel’s epic new book is already drawing accolades; Liz Braswell, in the Wall Street Journal, writes, “Without question this is the most imaginative piece of young-adult-adjacent fiction I ..read more