Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 176: Fall 2025 i The New Quarterly

the firekeeper tossed cedar and washed his hands in the firehe turned and looked at melike I was familiar with asking for forgivenesshis voice splits as he told me about a time when it didn’t‘I dreamt of your ancestors, they were here before’liquid spirits flowing like rapids during breakupI waved the sweetgrass around my throatand it stuck like nectarfirekeeper is kingduring ceremonythe tobacco escapes meslips right off my tonguewraps around me like seal skinthe rhythm of the drum floods my feetand I whisper ‘but I can’t swim’yet I wade in anyway my breath was a prayer I forgot I knewlast night i signed a ledgerwith my body and spirithe told me to imagine my strengthsay it loudmove for ittonight i imagined my grieflooked at itimagined it was waterthen i drowned…

EVERY WEEKDAY, I WALK MY SON KAZ TO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, A NONDESCRIPT brick single-floor structure. Small parking lot, unmanageable snarls of drop offs, huge library (but few books), an athletic field that will never get the landscaping love it needs. He doesn’t approach any other children, though I encourage him to do so. No other children approach him. Later, when I pick him up from his aftercare, I arrive looking to see if he is engaged with other kids, but each evening he is either crafting with an adult, or he sits alone. On occasion, I’ve walked past the school playground, looking to see what he’s up to during recess. He sits on a bench, by himself, and returns inside when the bell rings. When I ask him why I…

She knows she’s been elected over the other girlsbecause of her industry in class, her many social graces. She knows, too, that her father died seven years ago,yet there he stands each night at the foot of her bed to wish her well before she falls asleep. She doesn’t knowhe will stop doing this the day she weds, that her husband lives in a house nearby and is already in his twenties.She doesn’t know a war is coming, as are her children, or that her love of tennis will ruin her knees. One dayshe will speak French and play the piano by ear. One day in a forest cabin, at the bottom of a wooden post, she willwrite her name to mark her graduation from college. One day she will…

“Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces,and discard them into widely-separated trash receptacles.” He’s talking about a poem: one written in secret,one never shared,one made as good as it could possibly be. And he says to its author: you’ll experience becoming,you’ll learn more about what’s inside you,you’ll make your soul grow. And he also says that going out to get an envelopeis a hell of a good time: seeing great-looking babes,watching a fire-engine go by,asking a woman about her dog. We’re here on earth to fart around,we’re dancing animals. And I guess that’s why there are so many of them—poems I mean. And I guess that’s why there are so many of us out and about—poets I mean. And would it be better if we all decided to engage,to put our…

But now he sleeps without end.Now the moss and the grassopen with sure fingersthe flower of his skull. -Federico Garcia Lorca“Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias” Lorca, I sit in your gardenon a wrought-iron bench in a pinkcloud of sun-pummelled petunias.I slip off my sandalsand listen for the rare trillof afternoon birds. Granada is all closed up.Your white house is neatand shuttered, wreathedin cypress and palm. A piano is silentin a curtained room. I resist imagining you reading,writing, drawing, or washing disheswith sleeves rolled up,making jokes with your family. Too many black and whitephotos of mass gravesbetween then and now. Spicy perfume is cut withthe smell of iron. The birds are silentin the heat. My bare feet go nowhere. Somewhere you lie in the earth.Someone once left his house, a kitchen,the…

Blood-warm in Normandy sun, worn round as bird-shotfor a god-sized gun, beach stones cradle in your hand. You ease tendril-fastened baby-teeth from trusting six-year-oldsand quills from quivering muzzles of our dogs, you should offer me a lush strawberry, a fragile pheasant egg—anything but stones and war-story.Picture roller-skating on a beach of these, Hon. Tanks wallowed here just like that. Oh yes, yes, I know, I know how beach-stones fall into themselves, the sink-holesof the Dieppe Raid. Your tawny eyes consult the overlooking hills where dug-in gun-embankments were, your face stunned, wondering at this wasteful way to die.I could smack them from your hand! Our opinions grind this way, like tank treads churning, deeper, deepermired, pinned like Allied tanks in crosshairs of brave history/ tedious history/our history.Didn’t I doodle your name…

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN AND A RUBBLE OF EXCEL SPREADSHEETS ON THE SCREEN from Henry who has parsed the life you had together into numbers, applying his own special logic that your lawyer says has no bearing on the legal reality of division of assets upon separation, but just hearing the hard edges of this mouthful of words jams your thoughts. It would be stupid to run up the mountain through flames that kick orange at wheat-like grass but taking apart these numbers including accounts you never knew about feels like digging into a fire that has scorched underground for years, feeding off roots. Squeezed between walls of plywood panelling, sweating in your non-airconditioned makeshift office, with a view of the mountain through the back window, you try to remember…

Love affairs can take many paths. There’s of course the “love at first sight” one – but that definitely doesn’t describe my relations with poetry. I liken my experience with poetry to a road trip I took in Ireland in 1980. It started on a doubtful note. There were four of us – my girlfriend (now wife) Lindsay, myself, and two of our friends. I’d been assured by the most confident of our group that a standard shift car would be “just fine.” But it turned out that only Lindsay could drive a standard and so we found ourselves in the pouring rain on the treacherous roads of County Kerry with an exhausted driver at the wheel and me as her front-seat navigator. But the perilous drop-offs to the sea,…

We had a week togetherin the mountains.Drove the Dempsterfrom Tombstoneto Blackstonein stop motion.Brake at waypointsvacate the car.I ponder over f-stopsto capture line shape lightin the arrangement of mountains.You surge forthlanky like a young caribouacross hummock and tussock.New to the urge to roamto seek your own way forward. I am desperate to not lose sight of you.You tangent off to whistle a marmot.There was a timeI might have kept pacenow I see you are alreadyhalf grown.I want to hold onto this image of youthis glimpse of timebefore your growingand my aging. Quick I take a picturethis still life of usbefore the shift of lightephemeral in the mountains.…

SHE OUGHT TO PULL HERSELF TOGETHER, PENNY THOUGHT. SHE OUGHT TO STAY beside her sister, rest her hand on Moira’s bony shoulder, and supply her with the names of friends and neighbours tottering in to pay their final respects to Moira’s husband, Sid. Sid, rigid as a log, had been manoeuvred into a dark suit he’d never once donned for any of the happier milestones of his long life, not even on the day he married Moira. For the last two hours Penny had been sitting near his casket with Moira or hovering beside Moira’s chair, helping her to her feet, both of them clasping hands and pecking at powdery cheeks until Penny couldn’t hold it in any longer. Tucking her chin to her chest, the brim of her hat…

AUTHOR AND EDITOR ANITA LAHEY PUBLISHED TWO BOOKS IN 2023—THE poem-filled graphic novel Fire Monster (with co-author and artist Pauline Conley) and the poetry collection While Supplies Last. Both books are haunted by a fire that destroyed much of Main-à-Dieu, Nova Scotia in 1976. The spring they were released, nearly fifty years after that devastating East Coast blaze, marked the start of the worst Canadian wildfire season in recorded history, which would see about five percent of the country’s forests burn. Rob Taylor sat down with Lahey to discuss her new books, releasing them in a time of environmental crisis, and exploring the “residue” of disaster in poetry. Rob Taylor: How did it feel watching town after town be destroyed, or threatened with destruction, as these books about the burning…

I AM NOT A “TECHIE” PERSON, BUT I HAVE TAKEN TO READING JOHN NAUGHTON’S column in The Observer newspaper because in so doing I learn what I need to know of that world in focussed commentaries. And because he seems wise at a time when wisdom is in short supply. Recently, when writing of “these times,” Naughton quoted Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, jailed by Mussolini. In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci wrote about what he called an “interregnum”—a period of crisis “which consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms occur.” I think we can all see the connection to this particular period in history but the idea of seeking…

THE PERSONAL IS NEVER STATIC. A COMPELLING PERSONAL ESSAY ISN’T ABOUT a fixed identity or neat resolutions; it’s about movement and change—a narrative that resists being pinned down or one that transforms each time you revisit it. This idea frequently emerged as I reviewed the submissions for this year’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. What does it mean to confront the past—considering family, grief, memory, and the places that shape us? What forms can the personal essay take when it embraces uncertainty or defies expectations? These were the questions I brought with me to our adjudication meeting. It was a genuine pleasure to read and discuss the shortlisted essays alongside Pamela Mulloy, Tasneem Jamal, and Emily Urquhart. Each of us contributed different perspectives, and our conversations were broad and insightful.…

HELEN VENDLER, THE WELL KNOWN AMERICAN ACADEMIC, WHOM ONE REVIEWER called “a colossus of poetry criticism”, maintained that there were up to fifteen levels of engagement with a poem, ranging from the phonetic through the imagistic to the emotional. In assessing the 440 entries for the fourteenth annual Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, Barb Carter and I were not quite as exacting, but we did have to do some very rigorous and even ruthless close reading (and re-reading) to narrow the poems down to a long list of twenty, which were then assessed by Ed and Kim Jernigan, who originated the contest in 2011 and have generously provided the $2000 prize money since then. Comparing top ten lists, assigning points for choices one to ten, and presenting the results on…

When, one twilight, I stop to admire you, little burro,the farmer acclaims you his prize livestock-protector, and tells memany people slow their cars down his hill to see you in your paddockby your stable on the Moreland-Dixon Road. Love’s why: a purple boiledwool coat lies like a caress along your sturdy back.I confess, small one—yes, I had you Eeyored. Now I notice howthe restive horses merely roll their eyes, content to twitch their tails at peacebeside the rails; the farm dog on the grass sees no reason to rise and bark. Little donkey, four-legged talisman of farmyard calm. A cirrus wisp melts to bluehigh above the blazing ribbon of horizon, my Mother’s far, faint voice fadesinto frog-song at the swale, earth’s warm breath lifts, a soft-worn A.A. Milnecloses light on…

It takes more than the swirl of vapour and lightpulled down by shadow to turn a cloud into whatone human eye will see unmistakably, the dog lostso recently, preserved in dark shrouds shiftingoverhead. His exuberant muscular form subtlyslowed until his halting gait turned some daysinto staggering like a pixelated simulation,a sudden dropping to the wet grass to recover.Crouched low he’d gradually gather himself,coalescing once more like the damp partsof an attenuated cloud as he rose, nose pointingtoward home. Ready, it seemed, for another roundof living before he’d succumb to the dissolutiondogging him ever more closely at every turn.The pet crematorium would return, with his ashes,a paw print set in clay (so like a lunar crater),but also a snip of dark fur from the base of his paw,its white blaze within…

Waves like thunder, while priestsset up their stations. Red cliffsoverlook the sand. Flowers wash up,are taken back to sea. Lifeguards stand by. The undertow here is fierce.Just half an hour’s drivefrom where my father grew up, this waterwashes away wrongdoings, prepares a soulfor salvation. There was a virus, spreading fast. There was a travel ban.My father’s ashes sat in a plastic boxin the closet in my childhood bedroom. We were not showy people. We never desired much.Even now, my mother regretsthat we could not deliver his ashes to the seaat Papanasham Beach. I stand in the water, four years too late. My father’s ashesalready in a lake in Michigan. Other mournersrelease flower-covered bundlesinto the waves. A garland of pink blossomswashes onto my feet.…

after Amadou Hampaté Bâ, and Jorge Luis Borges a library burns. Repeated, the phrase becomes theme,motif, figure. Itself a variation, it invites others,so striking are its chords. And though the concert playsin Africa, its music carries wide and far,wherever old men and women gather, wherevermemory is on the cusp of extinction. An old man now, I makemy own music. What will die with me whenI fall silent? What fragile, fleeting formswill the world lose? A child’s knife with pea-greenBakelite handle. The milkman’s clop and clinkin pre-dawn streets. On the dank air of mygrandparents’ house cabbage and linimentmingled with smoke from books they never owned.…

“DO YOU EAT BANANAS?” I never want to assume. The worst outcome would be spending money to buy bananas and then having the bananas go to waste because the panhandler’s allergic to bananas or doesn’t like bananas or already has bananas. Maybe he’s spent all day eating bananas and the reason he’s asking for food and money outside the Trader Joe’s is because he needs nutritional variety, who knows? He answers that yes, he eats bananas, so I go into the store and beeline for the fruit section, making sure I land at the regular banana rack, not organic. The difference is small, 19 cents vs 25, but it adds up over time. And it’s not like the guy cares. It’s not like I’d give him bananas and he’d check…

SAM TEXTS TO ASK, FOR A FRIEND, HOW MUCH ALLISON’S STUDENTS WOULD go for on the black market. It’s September, so Allison’s just met the new batch of middle schoolers that will be her class for the next nine months. Sam texts because they don’t see each other anymore. Restricted to a cellular penpal-ship. It’s a bad-luck thing. A caution thing. When they see each other, trouble follows. Allison describes her new students in loose terms. A couple of them who can’t sit still, some that read to themselves out loud, unaware they aren’t on mute—a leftover symptom of two years of online learning. One kid she knows from her time as a summer school teacher in July. Sam knows about this kid. She and Sam were allowed to see…

amuse themselves.After hours, they relaxposes held for centuriesthen, walk out of theirpaintings to use washroomsdesigned by poetic license. 1.Girl switches famous pearlearring for gold hoop the sizeof a bracelet. Though comelyin the 1660s, she removes haircloth Vermeer stroked on herscalp with blue and ochre:bald head gleams. She scrubsthat portrait gaze off herface; applies maroon lipstickinstead. The mirror grins. 2.Mona Lisa arrives with aneyebrow pencil. She keepsher smile. Hints of linseed oilwaft through her gown fromevenings spent trying not tolaugh in Da Vinci’s studio.The artist would flap his armsto demonstrate ideas for a flyingcontraption, then plunk backon his stool and resumepainting. In homage to thatRenaissance man, she raisesthe shawl drawn across hershoulders: brown wings ascending. 3.Toilets flush: Venus emergeswrapped in a dress she createdfrom rolls of bathroom tissuelike a college prank,…

A SOFT CLINKING WAKES COR. A LOW MORNING SUN IS SPLINTERING INTO HIS eyes. The light dims somewhat as a billowing curtain falls back into place—a flimsy lacy thing. So unlike his father. Maybe it came with the house—like the creamy wallpaper with the pink tulips? Last night when Cor had stumbled up the stairs after several beers with Pap, he hadn’t noticed anything. Groaning, he turns around. The space beside him is empty. Why did she get up so early on a Saturday? He pulls the sheets up to his chin, but the tinkling melody keeps him awake. In the kitchen Isabelle is on her laptop. “You’re working?” “Just reading a bit.” She doesn’t look up. “There’s coffee.” Cor drinks it in the living room, next to the radio…

CLASS TIME’S WINDING DOWN, SO MR. GRAHAM DISTRIBUTES THE ASSIGNMENT, outlining what he wants from us as he moves amongst our desks: “Write whatever pops into your head. Let your thoughts flow in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way.” “Stream of what?” “Should be in your notes, Lucas. And remember, I do expect you to edit any work before you submit it, so keep Strunk and White handy.” “When’s it due?” Carly. “One week, next Friday.” Groans issue from my left, those who’ve received their pages. “Now, now, it’s Advanced Placement Language Arts for a reason, people. So,”handing off my copy, “what do you write about? How the poem affects you, what it makes you see, smell, think of, recall.” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” final poem in this…

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. After 25 years he quit The Fiddlehead over their censorship of a good story he had accepted and is now a fiction editor with Camel magazine. Burn Man, (Biblioasis, 2023) was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times. Adèle Barclay is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry, The Fiddlehead’s 2022 Fiction Prize, and a 2025 National Magazine Gold Award. They are the author of If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Renaissance Normcore. Richard Brait is a corporate lawyer living in Toronto. He has degrees in…

Kusatsu Station was small, one of those countryside platforms where time seems to slow down. I was five minutes early when I stepped off the Shinkansen but a sense of haste clung to me as if I were an hour late. What did Miwa-san look like again? It’s been six years since I last saw him, and eight years since we met for the first time at his office in Osaka. The sterile scent of new fabrics, shelves of neatly cut swatches, and gleaming fluorescent lights resembled any other textile showroom I visited in Japan. Yet, unlike the others, I was not turned away for my small-scale production. Seared in my memory is Miwa’s silhouette—first disappearing to the backroom without a word—then reemerging with a welcoming tray of hot tea…

LET’S SAY IT’S 1980 IN CALGARY, ALBERTA AND THE PRAIRIE SKY DARK IN THE early evening is clouded with November storm. Snow licks a hospital parking lot clean. Imagine air so cold you can see breath or lose an ungloved pinky. In this scene, a bleary-eyed wolf in a blue sweatshirt pulls out of a stall. Accompanying him is a lamb, his wife of only a couple months, who holds a wailing infant close to her curly black fleece in the front passenger seat. Let’s say this is an old story, a parable even, about what happens after a wolf woos a lamb, about how endings are sewn into beginnings, about how it’s hard to tell the difference between the wails of humans and the cries of animals. Checking over…

I remember the grasses sprang with cricketsalong the rows, softened by decades and coastal rainsto emerald allées with gravestones shaped like lozengesand the bright Atlantic glittered her sapphires below usand you performed some small subtractions with the numberson the stones and I followed you into the simple math.Sixteen. Fifteen. Seventeen. They were boys.Boys, bikes dropped curbside, schoolbooks jumbledinto tottering stacks, pitchforks standing in the hay and little brothersjumping up and down outside the windows of the train, mothers’ hankiesfluttering long goodbyes. How long did it take to thread a throughlinefrom tight throats and welling eyes into mortal dark disclosuresin the red, wet maw of war’s beast, how long to pull the curtains closedacross eyes of boys, across the bluest sky of Normandy?I remember the pergola with the visitors’ log where…

First I borrowed a 20-foot extensionladder and dropped a handfulhigh in the flue of the church pipeorgan, your key of G. ThenI snuck into the fairgrounds andsalted the popped kernelsat the kettle corn stand, your favouritesnack. I flew to Scotlandand in the Dundee Medical MuseumI dusted a little of your ashesover the forceps that left thatpermanent dint in your forehead.And while I was there, I had youstirred into the pastefor the spines of Oxford Englishdictionaries, to hold the wordsyou loved. When it came time totake you to the river, I stoppedwhere your grandsons jumped fromthe ledge each summer butthere were people and you never likedcrowds. I hiked downstreambut found it too weedy. At last my sistersand I, leading our rickety mother,climbed under a secret bridge to astrong flow by a…

I think Frankno-no not Frank AllenAllen the meticulous mechanic that’s right and I walk on searching the sunlit glass of the officeit’s a weekday someone must be in thereyet I don’t wave Back at line three my mind leapt from Allen the mechanicto Alan the theoretical mathematician a neighbourand friend who looked like a young Glenn Gould Alan who carried my groceries as I struggled with crutchesand later taught me the arithmetic of Pascal’s trianglea simple thing but requiring careful attention Alan who made those basics brilliantly clear He was alive innumbers graceful like the elegant motion of fractalsand I think of him often when I write At parties most of us steered away from his subjectsubstituting weather or news of our dogs thoughif you get me started on poetry…

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK WHAT WE LOOK FOR IN A STORY—A QUESTION FOR WHICH there is no simple answer but may include: strong writing, unique subject matter, a life we feel compelled to follow, a sense of place, a splash of humour, something that makes us think, or think differently about things. The reality is that it can be any one of these things or a mix, and sometimes it’s a gut response to the reading of it. This year’s winner “Alert” by Leslie Palleson ticked many boxes from the above list, but it was also an ambitious story in the way she wrote so effectively in second person, and threaded the theme of escape through two narratives. We were easily won over. Humour is often missing in literary fiction so…

Burning Bright He paces the living room cagebrain on fire under red furround and round and roundthe square room. He has learnedabout grades from another in the pride.His first report cardboard clutchedin his claws hisses S’s for Satisfactory. But there are A’s and B’s.Letters are not just soundsyou shape your mouth toor circles and lines you bendyour bones to make, meaning applemeaning ball. Letters are scraps of meatthrown over the barricadeand lashes that flay. I’m going to bang my headagainst the wall every dayuntil I get A’s, he growls.The bars of the cage writhe. BOB The boy drew faces on erasers, year after schoolyear. I find them in drawers alongside grimy pencils. Some wide, some tall: always two eyes nearthe top, along with brows which might be surprised or angry,…

THERE IS ONE ROOM IN OUR APARTMENT. IT HAS A BED, A DRESSER THAT HOLDS a hot plate, a bar attached to the wall where our clothes hang. Down the hall is a bathroom shared by thirty people. “Do you want to do a little sex?” asks Jagdeep, wearing his Australia hat, as though the wearing of the thing will lead to a favourable answer. When he was twelve, he spent two years in Australia, and occasionally lets out a word with an accent that makes me laugh. “Mama-ji needs us to get on with it, you know.” Not long ago, Mama and Dada called me and my sister to their house and had us hold hands in front of Babaji to honour our family and its history. Babaji with…

CHRISTINE’S FAMILY HAD NEVER LOOKED SO BEAUTIFUL.THERE, ON THE STREET-facing living room wall in a dozen lozenge-shaped images. It had taken her all morning to arrange, level, and adhere the coaster-sized blocks into the happy people she saw before her. This was not counting the hours of curatorial effort she’d spent selecting the digital images then cropping, filtering, altering, so they’d match one another. Without her intervention they’d look like the tired, bored, grubby, moody, entitled, over-scheduled family that they were. She was between campaigns right now—it had been a particularly long stretch, was she being sidelined?—and she ran the family like a slate of candidates whose campaign slogan might read, Yes, We Will (Keep Up Appearances). She’d heard the advice once to be careful about what you get good…

Monsoon Small birds, beaks wide, panting,drop from barren trees;even the insects are motionless.No one sleeps, although the netted beds are outon the verandah—the old fan stirring airlike a spoon through oatmeal. But the sky is preparing to explode. Clouds billow as a Biblical dark descends;crashing thunder, swift slashes of lightening,bursts of sluicing water. In the scent released by rain on this sun-baked earthchildren and adults run outdoorsto dance and laugh in the deluge,praising Indra, god of rain, as the gulmohar tree,re-earns its name, Fire of the Forest.Tomorrow it will flame with scarlet blooms,lush green will spread through the desert, rivers flow. Cries of panni, panni, water, echo from village to village.Pale-faced foreigners from afar, we dance too,dripping hands outstretched. The Wall I was more than half in love with himthat…

Put money in thy purse.—Iago in Othello I am very innocent.—Donald J. Trump AFTER THE VIRUS, THE PRICE OF JET FUEL DROPS, AND SO THE JETS RISE AGAIN, 1.3 billion tourists climbing the time zones in this year of our Lord. I liked it better during Covid when we traveled, and they stayed home. They come from the east and come from the west to bump me from Italy’s narrow sidewalks. The pockmarked pickpocket is drawn to these tourist hordes, a thief drawn to the millions of wallets and phones, a completely natural phenomena, a bear reaching into rivers of salmon. Carnevale in Venice roars on, Fat Tuesday, and drunken travelers wander past, some in dollar-store plastic masks, some in period periwigs and gilded costumes, and the thief waits for…

TNQ (SAY IT THREE TIMES QUICKLY...) The New Quarterly is grateful to the institutions and individuals who support our work: to St. Jerome’s University which houses us; to the University of Waterloo in conjunction with the Ontario Student Assistance Program for paying our student interns; to St. Jacob’s Printery for services various; to our Board of Directors and our many volunteers extraordinaire, both in the editorial ranks and in the office; to Carolyn & Bill Pegg for countless hours spent organizing and running charity bingo sessions on our behalf; to the funders of our contest prizes—the late Edna Staebler, the family of Nick Blatchford, and the English Department at St. Jerome’s University; to our funders at the national, provincial, and municipal level (listed on our masthead); and to the many…