<\/p>\n
A Thousand Tiny Awakenings<\/em> 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 \u201cWhispers of Threads\u201d concretizes trauma and loss and is a visual feast of formatting, embodying both destruction and perseverance. Nicole Robitaille is a Ghanian-Canadian writer living in North Bay. Her poem \u201cHappiness is a Warm Dog,\u201d 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: \u201conce \/ combed by the master \/ who would beckon Persephone to rest in his lap \/ grooming her as carefully as one would polish a gun.\u201d \u201c28 Days of Compassion,\u201d one of Ra\u2019anaa Yamina Ekundayo\u2019s two poems in the anthology, is a meditation on Black History Month: \u201cAnd while I exist year round, for these next four weeks, they tell me I truly matter\u201d. She finishes the poem by declaring \u201cMe nah work for free, massa\u201d.<\/p>\n In \u201cWovenness,\u201d 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\u2019s narrator encounters two snakes on a road. One \u201clong and lean and little\u201d, lifts her head, but moves on quickly. The other ignores the narrator who walks beside him, but all three \u201cknow \/ we are water-bellied \/ Otherworlds\u201d. Read has one other poem in the collection. \u201cTwenty Eight Days\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Lisa Shen, writer, spoken word artist, and Youth Poet Laurate of the City of Mississauga (2023 to 2025) examines the art of mindfulness in \u201ci am living by the minute\u201d. She writes \u201cwhen the days are too much to carry, \/ i carve time into sand grains\u201d. This intense presence in the moment allows the poet to bear the weight and persist. 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 \u201cThe Dimensions of Bodies Kept Afloat.\u201d Palpitations Palpitations is Leduc\u2019s second poetry collection published by Latitude 46. He states that each poem represents a \u201cspark that can burn out in the dark or set the world on fire.\u201d 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. 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: \u201cI couldn\u2019t tell what time it was, \/ if that was my grandfather or \/ my own reflection, if I was, \/ the spider or the moth.\u201d In \u201cThat Day, at the Market\u201d a family holds ripe fruit, \u201cthe taste of life dripping from our chins.\u201d The next poem, \u201cTwo Peas in a Pod\u201d presents a contrast as \u201cHer empty body hums \u2026 hands nest in her lap, \/ palms cradling barren\u201d.<\/p>\n The Night We Burned the Dragon\u2019s Head is about rites of passage, revisiting the past, speculating about the future, and settling into the mindful present. \u201cThe Cross-Pollination of Stars\u201d 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\u2019s title poem is another right of passage, burning an artifact of the past while metaphorically stepping into the future.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cTouch-Starved\u201d recounts a shopping trip in which \u201cevenly spaced strangers \/ quiver like birds in the rain,\u201d where \u201cAncient hunters \/ fight over toilet paper\u201d, and \u201cThe cashier, caged in Plexiglass, \/ refuses to make eye contact.\u201d Families live together in isolation, compartmentalized by task. Social skills atrophy and the stir crazy seek distraction.<\/p>\n The Marble King is populated with favourite places, events, people, and body parts (I\u2019ll get to this), moments of crisis, and moments of dissolution. \u201cMy Northern Lake\u201d may feel familiar to many in northern Ontario who have bodies of water close to our hearts that set \u201cuse free, for a while.\u201d The poet has tea with Cohen, an open mic night opens all possibilities, and a neighbours\u2019 argument causes their friends to circle the wagons around their relationship. In \u201cManhood\u201d the titular appendage becomes a metaphor for life\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. In The Artist and the Assassin, Mark Frutkin has penned a page turner of lyrical imagination and historical recreation driven by the fictional hit-man Luca Passarelli and the turbulent genius, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Like Caravaggio\u2019s canvasses, Frutkin\u2019s novel highlights and contrasts contradictory characters and their starkly different perspectives in a novel that reads like a bestselling mystery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5268,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4878"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5416,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878\/revisions\/5416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nedited by Connor Lafortune and Lindsay Mayhew
\nSudbury, ON: Latitude 46 Publishing
\n2025 84 pages, $20.00<\/p>\n
\nA Nigerian student who writes to be the change she wants to see in the world, Chimdi Kingsley-Emereuwa wrote \u201cPain in Purpose \u2014 A Journey of Rediscovery\u201d to explore survival in a post-radical world.
\nAside from being co-editor of this anthology, Connor Lafortune is an Anishinaabek, Queer, and Francophone author and activist. Lafortune riffs off Thomas King in \u201cIndians in the Making,\u201d a prose piece pointing out that it\u2019s the \u201cPalatable Indian\u201d that colonial society craves. There are two more poems by Lafortune in A Thousand Tiny Awakenings, and a poem co-written with Lindsay Mayhew.<\/p>\n
\nLindsay 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. \u201cFeeling is an Organ is a Symphony\u201d focuses on anger as a healing emotion and equated to a bible-accurate angel: \u201ca brutal winged thing \/ Mouthless, feathered, petrifying \/ a thousand Eyes \/ blinking\u201d. Mayhew has three more poems in the anthology, including the one she co-wrote with Connor Lafortune.
\nKay Kassirer is a non-binary spoken word poet focusing on themes of gender and sexuality, grief, disability, and sex work. Their poem \u201cSchr\u00f6dinger\u2019s Casket,\u201d Kassirer explores the misogyny and gender essentialism of Judaism in the context of their mother\u2019s medically assisted death. Suicide is considered a sin because their \u201cbody belongs \/ to god\u201d. But their \u201cmother both did and did not kill herself\u201d, hence the title of the poem. Death held in superposition.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWanderers\u201d 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.
\nMichelle Delorme is an environmental scientist from Sault Ste. Marie who explores themes of climate change and climate grief in her poetry. In \u201cTacklebox Dream,\u201d Delorme mourns the loss of annual ice fishing. The dreamlike memory of years past pivots on the question, \u201cDoes this winter feel warmer than the last?\u201d at the heart of the poem and melts into grief as \u201cBoats float on the horizon instead of ice huts, well into winter.\u201d Delorme has a second poem in the anthology.
\nNon-binary community-based writer and installation artist Blaine Thornton\u2019s \u201cto be a tree\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHome,\u201d a piece of short fiction by Brennan Gregoire, an avid reader and writer from Sudbury, weaves together memories of the narrator\u2019s grandfather, his Indigeneity, the relics of his home-that-was, and the casual racism of a drunken friend at a party. In the end, \u201cthe wind in the grass, the moon through the trees, the water\u2019s whisper\u201d are as close as the narrator can get to home.
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
\nby Thomas Leduc,
\nSudbury, ON: Latitude 46 Publishing
\nMay 3, 2025 134 pages, $22.95<\/p>\n
\nThe 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 \u201cthe cold coffee of a cubicle \u2026 the sulfur of industry \u2026 the flat warm Coke of old age.\u201d The struggle to learn becomes the battle to land a fish. The section\u2019s title poem is a meditation on privilege. In \u201cUnder the Whitson River Bridge\u201d young lovers \u201c\u2026 sink into one another, \/ expand, contract, bond, and burn.\u201d \u201cMilk and Eggs\u201d chronicles the departure of a father and his return years later: \u201cHe couldn\u2019t understand\u2014we still needed \/ the milk and eggs. We would always need \/ the milk and eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nPalpitations is a worthwhile and worthy read. Leduc\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"