ABOUT THE BOOK
In its simplest sense, an occasional poem is one people reach for on occasions. It’s a poem people turn to. It’s a poem that is shared. It’s a poem born out of an occasion or written to commemorate an occasion which it then, forever after, speaks back to. But what constitutes an occasion in our oligarch-tech-bro-crazed moment of unravel?
What should we be celebrating? Commemorating? Sharing? How can we speak across the gulf of fake news?
The call for this anthology urged poetry in the tradition of the poem as an act of love, an act of protest, an act of visionary incantation, an act of remembrance, a call to arms, and a much-needed balm, and poets across North America and beyond responded. In a range of styles from formal lyric poetry to visual and avant garde, the poems in this anthology speak directly to our moment.
Here you will find life-cycle poems, from birth to death; poems that mark and mourn the seasons from spring through to winter; poems that startle in their revelations through formal innovations, language choices, and in their timelessness. There are new poems from emerging authors that are searing in their directness – and, very often, in their play. There are new poems from superstars A.E. Stallings and Ange Mlinko; poems that offer haunting snapshots of our burning world from Sue Goyette, Jan Zwicky, and Sue Sinclair. There is plenty of wit, from Suzanne Buffam, Heather Christle, Gary Barwin, and Rob Taylor; visual poems from Derek Beaulieu, Jordan Abel, Nasser Hussain, and Jen Bervin.
There are many poems of mourning for lost poets: Andrea Gibson, Roy Miki, Steven Heighton, Lyn Hejinian; and poems celebrating others: Sally Cooper on Sharon Osbourne, Canisia Lubrin on Dionne Brand. There are queer decolonial poems from Billy-Ray Belcourt; post-inauguration poems, poems for marriage, queer and otherwise; poems for birthdays, earworms, tinnitus, miscarriage, death and near death, poems against genocide and war, poems for loved ones lost in the fog of dementia and in the fervour of love.
This anthology is rooted in a belief that poetry is magic, and that even a small poem – a shard of poetry – can be enough to inspire gestures small and large, intimate, and at its best, expansive enough to power whole movements. These are poems for the people, for this moment, and for all the complex, verdant, and transformative occasions to come.
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