National Poetry Month : Rahat Kurd, The Harrowing Hour   By the pen   –  By the anniversary pen he gave you last night, and the dishes he left in the sink this mornin...

National Poetry Month (via @chaudierebooks.bsky.social) : Rahat Kurd, / @rahat.bsky.social @talonbooks.bsky.social ;
chaudierebooks.blogspot.com/2026/04/nati...

MA|DE, Married

After 8.5 years of dating, 8 years of writing collaboratively, 7 years of living together, 2 years of engagement, 1 century-old house & 1 dog adoption, we have finally tied the knot. If you weren't invited, that's because you aren't our parents.

👀

LOL yes exactly.

Omg that would be alarming. 😅

😂 That's a special one! I'd be hard pressed to even identify it as a lamb cake!

Think I might use this at work for an icebreaker: "Which lamb cake do you feel like today?"

I have yet to see a lamb cake that looks GOOD & yet I love them all.

Also cool to hear that the concept gets discussed explicitly behind the scenes! So much we never know about the thinking that goes into a particular collection, and always neat to get a peek behind the curtain. 😊

😂 This description would sell me on a book! No criticism of the series at all; I love the idea of curated reprints of poems from lit mags & suspect/assume you are utterly correct about the editors & that 'best' is simply a handy marketing term. (Also relevant points about 'Canadian' & 'poetry'!)

😊

Thank you so much! 🥹

Thank you, Kate! ☺️

or a political race, or a financial investment, when for me it has always been an escape from that kind of thinking.

Still, it feels like a great honour to have a fellow poet whose work you admire recognize something worthwhile in your art; in my mind that's one of the only things that matter.

As a side note, because asides always seem crucial rather than peripheral to me, "best" never fails to strike me as a funny, disconsonant word to apply to poetry. I have thoughts about the ways we frame art as a competitive sphere, as though it were a sport...

Many thanks to guest editor Tolu Oloruntoba @tolu.ca (whose work is stellar, go read it if you haven't already), series editor Anita Lahey, and publisher @biblioasis.bsky.social. More details to come.

Another writing first: I'm going to have a poem in Best Canadian Poetry!

"We Go Down to the Sea of Myrrh," which originally appeared in @cv2magazine.bsky.social's Fall 2025 issue, will be reprinted in the forthcoming 2027 anthology.

You can catch up with everything that happened to us and everything we loved over the past month!

Had a lot of fun writing this poem, even though it's a bit of a downer: "In the Third Sleep We Will Converge. After the Next Revolution We Will Stop Screaming." inthethirdsleep.blogspot.com/2026/02/in-t...

The latest addition to the "In the Third Sleep" ekphrastic project is none other than Jade Wallace ( follow @nycterosea.bsky.social )! You can read Jade's poem, and all the others, right here: inthethirdsleep.blogspot.com

A million thank yous to the @ontarioarts.bsky.social & the #canadacouncilforthearts for recently supporting our work(s) through the Recommender Grants for Writers & Literary Creation Projects for Publication programs (OAC) and the Public Lending Right (CCA).

New solo work by Mark!

Been a minute since we've been at a literary festival, so very much looking forward to this one coming up next weekend!! Join us online?!

Good luck with your iteration of it!

This was literally a quest I had (for years!) when I was a teenager and lived in a small town.

"you ask me what is my threshold?
on a scale of one to ten
ten childbirth
one, not being?"

A novel I have a copy of, obviously. Palimpsest Press @palimpsestpress.bsky.social continues to publish fiction that doesn't quite fit a conventional mould, which some days I would argue is the only kind worth reading.

One of the underrated pleasures of being a writer is when writers you admire casually name drop you and your novel in their interviews. 😍 See, for instance, @hollay.bsky.social in an interview with @alllitupcanada.bsky.social, talking about her debut novel: alllitup.ca/i-became-enc...

We had a great time at our first @onlibraryassoc.bsky.social SUPER CONFERENCE this past Friday in TO! It's fun to give away free copies of your books to librarian-strangers in a 20-minute frenzy of chatting & signing. Many thanks to our publisher @palimpsestpress.bsky.social for sending us.

two bees are gathering nectar from a purple and yellow flower Alt: two bees are gathering nectar from a purple and yellow flower

bzz bzz bzz we're still looking for work for our february and may issues from two-spirit, genderqueer, and non-binary writers bzzzzzzz

we pay $20

find out more >>>>> beestungmag.com/about/

Opinion | I'm a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here's how ICE observers are helping. Research into how violence occurs shows that disapproval from the people around you can help reduce it.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention.

The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.