Poetry and Fiction Reviews
A Thousand Tiny Awakenings
edited by Connor Lafortune and Lindsay Mayhew
Sudbury, ON: Latitude 46 Publishing
2025 84 pages, $20.00
This elegant, slim volume features the poetry and prose of 15 dynamic new voices on the Canadian literary scene. I want to spend some time introducing readers to each of the contributors to this anthology. Waed Hasan, a Palestinian refugee and PhD candidate researching refugee poetics, writes a lament for Beirut. The poem “Whispers of Threads” concretizes trauma and loss and is a visual feast of formatting, embodying both destruction and perseverance.
A Nigerian student who writes to be the change she wants to see in the world, Chimdi Kingsley-Emereuwa wrote “Pain in Purpose — A Journey of Rediscovery” to explore survival in a post-radical world.
Aside from being co-editor of this anthology, Connor Lafortune is an Anishinaabek, Queer, and Francophone author and activist. Lafortune riffs off Thomas King in “Indians in the Making,” a prose piece pointing out that it’s the “Palatable Indian” that colonial society craves. There are two more poems by Lafortune in A Thousand Tiny Awakenings, and a poem co-written with Lindsay Mayhew.
Nicole Robitaille is a Ghanian-Canadian writer living in North Bay. Her poem “Happiness is a Warm Dog,” contrasts images of pampered pooch Cookie with his ancestor Persephone, a plantation dog, who was used as a weapon against slaves. The last stanza is particularly chilling: “once / combed by the master / who would beckon Persephone to rest in his lap / grooming her as carefully as one would polish a gun.” “28 Days of Compassion,” one of Ra’anaa Yamina Ekundayo’s two poems in the anthology, is a meditation on Black History Month: “And while I exist year round, for these next four weeks, they tell me I truly matter”. She finishes the poem by declaring “Me nah work for free, massa”.
In “Wovenness,” Sydney Read offers up her theory of reciproesis, or the conscious orientation of oneself to the natural world through the reading and writing of poetry. Playing on the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, the poem’s narrator encounters two snakes on a road. One “long and lean and little”, lifts her head, but moves on quickly. The other ignores the narrator who walks beside him, but all three “know / we are water-bellied / Otherworlds”. Read has one other poem in the collection.
Lindsay Mayhew, co-editor of the anthology, is a spoken word artist and author who combines art, emotions, and theory in her work to give voice to mental health advocacy, healing, and feminist futures. “Feeling is an Organ is a Symphony” focuses on anger as a healing emotion and equated to a bible-accurate angel: “a brutal winged thing / Mouthless, feathered, petrifying / a thousand Eyes / blinking”. Mayhew has three more poems in the anthology, including the one she co-wrote with Connor Lafortune.
Kay Kassirer is a non-binary spoken word poet focusing on themes of gender and sexuality, grief, disability, and sex work. Their poem “Schrödinger’s Casket,” Kassirer explores the misogyny and gender essentialism of Judaism in the context of their mother’s medically assisted death. Suicide is considered a sin because their “body belongs / to god”. But their “mother both did and did not kill herself”, hence the title of the poem. Death held in superposition.
“Twenty Eight Days” by Carson Bohdi, poet and content creator, centres on the agony of dysmenorrhea and the recurring cyclic battle of having a uterus. Those of us so afflicted have been taught to suffer in silence. Voicing this unseen struggle claims space for the self and self-care.
Lisa Shen, writer, spoken word artist, and Youth Poet Laurate of the City of Mississauga (2023 to 2025) examines the art of mindfulness in “i am living by the minute”. She writes “when the days are too much to carry, / i carve time into sand grains”. This intense presence in the moment allows the poet to bear the weight and persist.
“Wanderers” by Tyler Hein, a Finnish-Canadian from Sudbury now living in Vancouver, is a bittersweet conversation between two friends over beers at the Legion about home and belonging. Questions of truth and bravery and whether you can ever really know another person are packed into this piece of short fiction and linger after the reading.
Michelle Delorme is an environmental scientist from Sault Ste. Marie who explores themes of climate change and climate grief in her poetry. In “Tacklebox Dream,” Delorme mourns the loss of annual ice fishing. The dreamlike memory of years past pivots on the question, “Does this winter feel warmer than the last?” at the heart of the poem and melts into grief as “Boats float on the horizon instead of ice huts, well into winter.” Delorme has a second poem in the anthology.
Non-binary community-based writer and installation artist Blaine Thornton’s “to be a tree” is a prose poem that meditates on the unhoused. To be a tree is to be a part of nature, to belong outside, to be unjudged for existing, unlike the unhoused. The narrator compares City and Hometown in their respective treatment of the unhoused and how Hometown becomes more like City as the trees bear witness. The desire to be a shelter-giving tree, a protective tree, speaks to the desire to shelter and protect the unhoused, who deserve to take up space.
Jesse June-Jack, an Afro-Canadian writer and spoken-word poet based in Toronto uses facts about the Hoover Dam to explore what it takes to survive when your mere existence is resistance in “The Dimensions of Bodies Kept Afloat.”
“Home,” a piece of short fiction by Brennan Gregoire, an avid reader and writer from Sudbury, weaves together memories of the narrator’s grandfather, his Indigeneity, the relics of his home-that-was, and the casual racism of a drunken friend at a party. In the end, “the wind in the grass, the moon through the trees, the water’s whisper” are as close as the narrator can get to home.
I attended the launch of the anthology and was privileged to hear several of the authors read their work. Each piece of poetry or prose centres issues their authors deal with daily. Whether violence, racism, misogyny, climate grief, being unhoused, navigating religion, culture, sexual orientation, or the intersection of any of these issues, A Thousand Tiny Awakenings offers the reader opportunities to awaken to the concerns of this new generation.
Palpitations
by Thomas Leduc,
Sudbury, ON: Latitude 46 Publishing
May 3, 2025 134 pages, $22.95
Palpitations is Leduc’s second poetry collection published by Latitude 46. He states that each poem represents a “spark that can burn out in the dark or set the world on fire.” Divided into five sections, Leduc recounts the palpitations that have shaped his life. He admits that some poems may be made up but cannily declines to say which ones.
The first section, Freefall, addresses the palpitations of navigating high school with a learning disability, sexual awakening, fumbling first love, and the legacy of familial wounds. Career counselling is fast food, and the future is “the cold coffee of a cubicle … the sulfur of industry … the flat warm Coke of old age.” The struggle to learn becomes the battle to land a fish. The section’s title poem is a meditation on privilege. In “Under the Whitson River Bridge” young lovers “… sink into one another, / expand, contract, bond, and burn.” “Milk and Eggs” chronicles the departure of a father and his return years later: “He couldn’t understand—we still needed / the milk and eggs. We would always need / the milk and eggs.”
Opposing Influences dances between youth and age, past and present, family life and relationships never realized, spirituality and religion. These palpitations are full of reflection, realization, and regret. A graffitied rock beside a highway inspires a search for the divine. A trip to the past results in the poet becoming unstuck: “I couldn’t tell what time it was, / if that was my grandfather or / my own reflection, if I was, / the spider or the moth.” In “That Day, at the Market” a family holds ripe fruit, “the taste of life dripping from our chins.” The next poem, “Two Peas in a Pod” presents a contrast as “Her empty body hums … hands nest in her lap, / palms cradling barren”.
The Night We Burned the Dragon’s Head is about rites of passage, revisiting the past, speculating about the future, and settling into the mindful present. “The Cross-Pollination of Stars” recounts a concert that is as much spiritual awakening as it is entertainment. A return to high school becomes a trip down memory lane. A father takes his daughter to her first job, working at the local Cineplex during the Barbenheimer phenomenon. The section’s title poem is another right of passage, burning an artifact of the past while metaphorically stepping into the future.
The fourth section, Murmuration of Covid, may be self-explanatory, but the moments of the pandemic, a Christmas without family, queuing for vaccinations, the fifty-seventh covid test, physical distancing, and Zoom meetings are all worth revisiting. We were all there. “Touch-Starved” recounts a shopping trip in which “evenly spaced strangers / quiver like birds in the rain,” where “Ancient hunters / fight over toilet paper”, and “The cashier, caged in Plexiglass, / refuses to make eye contact.” Families live together in isolation, compartmentalized by task. Social skills atrophy and the stir crazy seek distraction.
The Marble King is populated with favourite places, events, people, and body parts (I’ll get to this), moments of crisis, and moments of dissolution. “My Northern Lake” may feel familiar to many in northern Ontario who have bodies of water close to our hearts that set “use free, for a while.” The poet has tea with Cohen, an open mic night opens all possibilities, and a neighbours’ argument causes their friends to circle the wagons around their relationship. In “Manhood” the titular appendage becomes a metaphor for life’s potential and the failure to attain it. The terror of guns and gun violence, the grace of malfunctioning parking metres on the way to cancer treatment, and beached whales as a metaphor for environmental plunder make appearances here. The section’s title poem sees the poet saving the aggies and allies of his favourite youthful pastime to distribute to loved ones and drop in important places. Some will be scattered on his grave.
Palpitations is a worthwhile and worthy read. Leduc’s poetry invites you to think, feel, and remember. These poems will lead you down surreal rabbit holes and make you laugh. Whatever else you experience, your heart will palpitate with each poetic moment.