What will Martin Appleby, a poet, punk, vegetarian, cider drinking scumbag, and editor of PAPER AND INK LITERARY ZINE, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Matthew Haigh, author of Black Jam (Broken Sleep Books), include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
…an ode to the complexity of relationships and how often we may be hiding in order to sustain someone else
What will A$iahMae, author of “oxygen” (2016) and co-creator of now defunct online mag For The Scribes, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Derek Beaulieu, author/editor of over twenty collections of poetry, prose, and criticism, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will SaraEve Fermin, performance poet, editor, epilepsy/ mental health advocate, & 2015 Best of the Net nominee include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Laura DiNovis Berry, book reviewer and poet, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Travis Chi Wing Lau, whose chapbook, The Bone Setter, was recently published with Damaged Goods Press, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Andrés Cerpa, author of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) from Alice James Books, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
If you want a quick dive into our collective punk-rock past, these poems will transport you back to being 15 again; old enough to sneak into the bar from backstage but young enough to still covet the drummer
#TPQ5: ALAN PARAY
What will Alan Paray, Published poet and playwright from Merseyside, England, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Stuart Buck, Best of the Net Nominee, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
Because of this she believes pain accrued is simply part of life and develops a calloused outlook on love and sex.
We are equals who do not know it. We are hidden behind skin and bones and names and colors and genders and identity, but we are not whole.
What will Ross Robbins, author of The Three EPs, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Nassere Hussain, Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature (Leeds Beckett University, UK), author of SKY WRI TEI NGS (Coach House Books 2018), include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
these poems are tender and honest and complex. The speaker turns a critical gaze on himself often, acknowledging his part in the distance that grew between himself and his lover.
What will Salam Wosu include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
And if things get scary, there’s a comfortable scrap of wool left to pull over their eyes. Hiding in comfort. Things are still good. Stop being so dramatic.
What will Holly Pelesky, author of Quiver: A Sexploration, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
Who will Christina Strigas, featured by CBC Books in, “Your Ultimate Canadian Poetry List: 68 Poetry Collections Recommended by You,” include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Robert Frede Kenter, Co-editor/publisher at Ice Floe Press, include in today’s #TQP5? Find out inside!
Through poems predicated on the Turing Test structure, Choi introduces the reader to questions that test not just whether or not the respondent is sentient, but also seek to undermine the humanity of specific identities in daily life.
Who will Jaye Simpson, queer indigenous trans woman trying to survive the end of the world, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Charlotte Hamrick, Creative Nonfiction Editor for Barren Magazine, include in today’s #TPQ? Find out inside!
What will A.M. Juster include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Mark Antony Owen include in today’s edition of #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Neil Sparkes, a poet, musician and visual artist, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
Poetry doesn’t give me the power, doesn’t licence me, to say whatever I want in whichever way I choose. It rather forces me to attend to the potentials of language and to generate meanings beyond my private prerogatives.
#TPQ5: ADRIAN ERNESTO CEPEDA
What will Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, author of Between the Spine, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
While the poems can at times express hopelessness, rage and what feels like a long held grudge, there is a resilience in these words that very much feels like a reclamation of power – a reversal of every wrong done.
#TPQ5: MATT DUGGAN
What will Matt Dugan, author of
Woodworm (Hedgehog Poetry Press), include one today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
This is when I realized that I needed to stop running from my fate and fear of failure and face the destiny of stanza, rhymes and climaxes waiting to be crafted before me.
It’s becoming immersed in that which you do not know. It’s starting from scratch. It’s acknowledging the past that had been left out of the histories you told.
Sometimes we are bored. Sometimes we are lonely. Sometimes we are horny. Sometimes we have to turn around and around and around again to simply fit.
What will Joseph Fasano, winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize and the Cider Press Review Book Award, include on today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Jen Rouse, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Carlos Andrés Gómez, author of Hijito, include on today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What does Glen Wilson, winner of The Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing and the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award, include on today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
What will Shazia Hafiz Ramji, the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, include on her #TPQ5? Find out inside!
[This] is a haunting and eye opening collection which recounts heartbreaking personal experiences being both mother and mothered
What will Megha Sood, National level poetry finalist in Poetry Matters Prize for 2019, include in today’s #TPQ5? Click to find out!
What will Dean Rhetoric, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a BBC Writer’s Room finalist and was once commended for The Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
Too many people are Goodwill books – spines taped together, hoping for enough threads to keep them in place. Too many wear covers by which they are judged. Too many are discarded without being read.
Who will Paul Robert Mullen, Editor of Broken Spine Arts, include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
Who will Marielle Songy, writer, Artist, 9th generation New Orleanian include in her #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
Who does David Estringel, Poetry Editor @fishbowlpress & @MagazineElixir include in his #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
Because Cepeda wants you to be the paper to your lover’s pen. Because poetry is so much more than words on paper. Because sometimes sex is more than sex. Sometimes sex is the poem you become for your partner when they need you the most.
What did Claire Millikin, the author of 6 full-length books of poetry, include on her #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
Once I divested myself of my image of a poet with a capital P, as an old dead white man from the early 20th century or earlier who had intoned poems in an English accent whilst stroking his sizeable beard, my whole world opened up.
This is a call to all who grew up wondering how they ended up who they became, and how to enjoy every second of it before you realize that “no amount of surgery could erase those scars.”
What will Juliette Sebock, founding editor of Nightingale & Sparrow, include in her #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
Who does Megan Neville, author of Rust Belt Love Song (Game Over Books), include on her #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
It’s clear to me now that poetry isn’t just a way for me to locate meaning in experience but is the very organizing principle behind my thinking. Because I can’t visualize in my mind, I conjure through language.
These poems take the reader through generations and geographies a lens that feels deeply personal; the reader becomes a fly on the walls as these families are presented and personified.
What will Jose Hernandez Diaz include in today’s #TPQ5? Find out inside!
These are conversations between friends, lovers, inmates, and acquaintances. These are the stories of someone who lived their life until there was no more. And then, unfortunately, there was no more.
What does Mandy Suzanne-Wong include in her #TPQ5? Find out inside!
Who will Sara place in her #TPQ5? Find out inside!
It can be both the push and pull that keeps you moving through life – even if it’s more an I-could-probably-do-this-on-my-own-but-I’m-not-going-to-unless-you-force-me type of push. Other times it just fucking hurts.
What will Alexander Wallis include in today’s edition of #TPQ5? Find out inside!
It’s okay to be comfortable. To live life day-by-day, and keep it simple. It’s okay to feel like we move through life as a slow drawl – not slow, but easy.
What will Anne Walshe Donnelly, author of The Woman With an Owl Tattoo (Fly on the Wall Press), include on today’s #TPQ5?
If there’s one thing that probably rings truest for me among all the things I could say about the power of poetry, it would be that poetry has the capacity to make us better people.
Which books and writers will Colin Dardis, author of The Dogs of Humanity, include on his #TPQ5? Find out inside!
“It’s knowing that it was okay to not want to be royalty. To, instead, want it to be Halloween – to want the ability to wear Vulnerable as a mask without any consequence of laughter.”
Which books did Jeremy Gaulke, Editor in Chief of APEP Publications, include on this edition of #TPQ5? Find out inside!
Maybe, sometimes, it’s because a particular poem needs revisiting more than once to understand what it’s trying to say. Or maybe it’s because the power of a poem is beyond the actual words, and needs time to discover.
If you could reshape history, would you stay woodworm, or would you scrape, claw, stab, and squeeze your way to the top?
Which books does Ace Boggess, author of States of Mercy (Alien Buddha Press), have in his #TPQ5?
From those we love, to those we’ve loved in mirrors, we are left to sift through and decide between thoughts, facades, and realities. This is our path to survival, to strength, to moving on regardless of those who’ve hurt us.
Which books does Charles Jensen, author of Nanopedia, have on his #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
What books does Jack B. Bedell, Louisiana Poet Laureate, have on his #TPQ5?
In poetry, you find the life stories of each of us and as a reader, you interpret each poem in your own way, despite the real meaning behind the poem or regardless of the reasons why the writer wrote it.
It’s an acknowledgement of those we’ve lost in the fire, and those we’ve gained because of it. That, it’s never the drug, but rather the longing to quell the quiet.
Who does Alex Smith include in his #TPQ5? Find out in today’s edition!
Add your own from the link at the bottom.
This is the poet, reflecting inwardly, recalling moments when ‘the sad trickles in like morning rays’ with the empowering and uplifting revelation: ’you can rise to face it’.
Find out who is in Samuel Guest’s #TPQ5?
Add your own from the link at the bottom.
“….the act of creating, of writing or of speaking a poem into existence, is an act of discovery, of discovery of meaning, an act of self-discovery—who I am at this given moment in time?
Who does Weasel, founder of Weasel Press put in his list of top 5 authors? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
Who’s in your #TPQ5?
And after All tackles the passage of time with snapshots of life that has me searching through my own for moments and memories that speak as musically as her words do. And as a fellow Latina poet, she’s an inspiration worth reading again.
What does Lyd Havens put in their list of top 5 books? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
breathtaking flights of fancy that will give you the bends before undercutting these mercurial moments with a healthy dose of dark humour. These balloons have anchors.
People want what they want. They want to be dominated, pissed on, talked down to, used, pleased, titillated, and teased. More than anything, they just want to feel like they don’t have to feel anything other than their truest desires for however long time, or money, can afford.
What did Fred Schmaltz put in his top 5? Find out in this edition of The #TPQ5.
She becomes the alpha and the omega, earth and firmament as we become willing travellers on her journey through the hills of Ireland and the drumlins of memory
Who does Jim Whiteside, the 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, put in his list of top 5 authors? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
Who does Angela Gabrielle Fabunan put in her list of top 5 authors? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
“We Blacks in space are Hoovers.
Who gonna be cryin’ in the 23rd century? / Not this hole’s grand grands. We define / the light until we all done letting stars be bright / ‘N suck up all the credit for nothing / they do ‘cept sit there burning.”
“…remember that “if you double a bubble / you will have two bubbles / but this information isn’t worth / a pile of rubble.” We don’t always want what we find, but we are often the reason we’ve found ourselves there.”
What does Ronnie Stephens put in his list of top 5 books? Find out in this edition of #TPQ5.
Who does rob mclennan, Founder of Above/Ground Press, put in his list of top 5 authors? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
Monsters are truly everywhere. Usually, though, they look just like us.
It’s the slant-rhyme hymnals with a push-away-from-God-and-man chorus you can’t keep out of your head. These are hymns for the hopeless who long to be significant.
Who does award winning author, Ran Walker, put in his list of top 5 authors? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
Some ask us how many beats our hearts have left. Others just cut to the core of all our fears, to the ‘kelp-nest of wires’ as her fifth born slumbers ‘tiny and certain’
I can’t go to work and say to a colleague: I stay up late at night imagining animals being hit in the road over and over…
Who does Alexandra Meehan put in her list of top 5 books? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
We can certainly watch The Shining as a movie about ghost leading a man down a path of madness, but isn’t it scarier to think the ghosts are figments of his imagination, and his madness’ provenance is in the anger he ignores and represses?
What did Kristin Garth, Founder of Pink Plastic House, put in her top 5? Find out in this edition of The #TPQ5.
The reason isn’t always so obvious, but wear masks and costumes at each stage of life. We are, in most moments, who we choose to be. And in others, we become, well, others.
Who is in your top 5 list of writers or books? Allow us a glance into who or what inspires you. Complete the form inside to submit your list.
We all have our ideals of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. If eventually we all die, then what is life if we can’t burn through a paycheck in a day – especially with the ones we love.
Who does Joshua Lew McDermott, Co-Founder of Line Rider Press, put in his list of top 5 authors? Find out in this edition of The TPQ 5.
Deglane successfully submerges us into the mind of a person troubled by depression, anxiety, trauma, and a Lexapro-fogged brain with an overarching story of hope.
At this moment I’m typing in my apartment. A dog barks from a neighbor’s yard. A petal drops from the vase of wildflowers on my desk. And still I am in my parents basement playing with an eight-track recorder.
We are caretakers to those who don’t even know they need it. We don’t matter. We are a secondary character in a long history of other people’s lives. We are found in the footnotes.
While it can never be too late, it can be not enough, or just enough, or meaningless. But when most things are stuck somewhere between our dreams and the idea of reality, we tend to cling to some extrinsic hope – real or not.
Is it worth all the struggles and hassles and deductions only to die in the end? Should it all just be sped up? But more importantly, what happens when you don’t have a choice?
we get a straight forward here’s-what-I’m-thinking-and-maybe-I-should-have-just-done-it-earlier thread running from cover to cover. Things don’t always work, but sometimes you need to open the book and find out for yourself.
In this way I am an outfielder, mobilized on the balls of his feet, crouched, glove hand and free hand never far apart, poised for the seed of poetry to head my way following the sharp crack of wood at the plate.
Sometimes your body is not a wonderland. Sometimes your body wants to be wrapped in clothing or bedsheets or not the arms of someone who will no longer know your name.
I have authored a devil in me to cull in meto lace these boots with rainbows and wade the bogs to Breathe smoke in the cryogenyBreak dismal syntaxof existing as abomination — from “Lottery” Think back to before the digital sky overshadowed the world. Think back to small hands, poppy seeds, summer scenery, vermillion skies,…
There is not a right or wrong way. There is only advice. There is only a suggestion of what you might need – if you were here, and I was not alone.
Music provides a table of contents for life. It doesn’t always make sense, but it’s the order of things and it tries to present some pretty scenery.
Poetry has spread itself thick throughout my life much like this mint. I’ll write a line, put it in my pocket, roll it around a bit, and then hours or days or months later, it’ll have rooted itself and grown into something.
When language and bodies and heritage and history don’t make sense, it’s not easy to find yourself within the world. When the words your family speak turn to those once spoken. When your parents silence your voice, and all you want to do is remember the sound of theirs.
What do you do when you have a sentence where the same 10 years acts as the minimum and maximum? When there is no light? A spoonful of food? Pepper sprayed and left without water for weeks? You pace in your cell.
It’s the wondering if we have purpose or if we are allowed to change, or if we are stuck with the who that we are even we are not who thought we could be.
The landscape intensified into a fever dream of hail and sun, deep woods, shadows on the sea and boomeranging, shrieking swifts in the sky. I was watching Six Feet Under…[and] listening to PJ Harvey.
Because at first we are skeletal; we crack, break, and hurt; we lose and win, and lose again until the only choice we have is to either heal, or heel.
“…the attitude and actions of horses have not changed. They live, love, falter, get dragged around, manipulated, fed, ridden, and eventually buried. Sound familiar?”
Sometimes we forget that when we say “I love you” to someone, it is life changing. It affirms and confirms what you feel and what will hopefully be reciprocated. But love can be two-faced and effacing.
“We are maps to the present and the past. An erasure poem of everything that has been a part of our life. It’s cloudy, dense, and filled with fog. And then everything repeats…”
Today, writing this in a parking lot while my son gets ready for a hockey game, I have the word “miracle” stuck in my throat. But, poetry is not the miracle. Life is. And poetry has allowed me to embrace that.
“Postpartum depression is still surrounded by stigma and shame is often directed at mothers. Horan does not shy away from sharing this darker side of motherhood…”
“…he has taken all the pieces, the histories of hands, waterfalls, sanity hammers, shepherds, and suitors, and built the puzzle only to watch it fall to the floor, and have to put the pieces back in the box.”
I kept thinking to myself about the idea that nature is—and will always be—in charge, and we’re destined to bend to its will
For me, writing evolved into a way to better comprehend, articulate and even reshape the world. Now the work that excites me is writing that is exploratory
Havens has a savage wit and open wound for you to see on every page. Their lyricism surpassed only by the abundant imagery, you can almost feel the poems being written for YOU.
Wars are waged. Bodies are born and bathed and dying. Language is lost. Friends and lovers, too. If we are “guardians of God’s words” then what is it exactly that we are guarding
We are stuck in age-old definitions of gender and personhood and parenting and life. Somewhere in between those definitions is the person we, ourselves, long to be, and who we should “just be.”
She’s taking understated moments from life and creating fantastic poems around them, bring a whole new meaning to day-to-day moments.
It is how both can have their salvations split in two in a single process. I think it was Jericho Brown that said: “Poetry has its own language”. Nothing can be truer in my opinion.
Kirby’s poem had to be read twice and three times and more because it grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go.
It’s an encyclopedia of the seedy, the attractive, the “I” of life within modern times and modern body. It’s sort of like the words many want to say, but then get caught up in the moment, and can’t remember what they were thinking anymore.
It’s the way the ants that crawl from skin become guides and senses. It’s the way that when you meet another splinter, the bugs are meant for each other – in sickness and in health.
Reading Lyd Haven’s work makes me want them to win. Makes my real world seem to fade away, replaced with someone I want to see succeed despite and because of their troubles.
The whole time, I thought I was alone. But there were people just as pained and confused as I was. I found my community. I found my church. I kept returning every Sunday, sharing work I had written during the week.
It’s the mirror as a reflection of who you think they want – the makeup, the high heels – but really it’s the only way to be seen. No(Body) asks you to question the idea of being capable within the moment. It’s the attempt to be Beyonce, or not death.
Adam Sol’s How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers Afraid of Poetry, is a window into how poems move rather than what they state. It’s a personal approach to understanding how someone else’s words make you feel.
There is a misconception of place, time, and atmosphere of the Heartland. It’s not always calm. It’s not rolling hills and farmland and nice people who do nice things for other nice people, and continue their existence in a silo of that same nice feeling.
Yes, I’m a poet and proud of it, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to be anything else. It’s what I would have said in answer to that old chestnut, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Wow! How many people actually get to have their dreams come true?
If life is lived, vicariously, through dreamscapes and if the moon hotel’s bellhop is “trolleying [the moon’s] baggage on a brass birdcage cart,” then we are destined to hold the weight of the universe on our backs.
It’s being told that “making love is for making babies / and gays are intrinsically disordered,” and realizing all the misguided beliefs behind that statement. Realizing that your love for another is in no way a disorder.
Elfie gives us a look at the daily struggle that can be experienced when fighting against these natures, and in the end, shows us the relief that comes with the recognition of our own personal truths.
If Death brings a flash of life before our eyes, and we see each detail of what and how we’ve lived, and everything that was once background became foreground, then Where the Road Runs Out, the new collection from Gaia Holmes is that flash.
Some poems will remain within the confines of the therapist’s office. Some poems will never be known to anyone other than myself. Some poems I share with the world.
Dominik Parisien’s poems embody chronic pain, elevating the traumas, and illuminating the act of breathing being the most essential part of living. He uses body parts, the act of breathing, religion, and science, to illustrate the struggle and the pain that the poetic voice endures.
This is a notice that life is genuinely what you make it, and that if you live it while looking at it, you might miss what is actually in front of you.