Help shape Arc’s future! 📣
This National Poetry Month, share your thoughts in our community survey.
Readers, writers, contributors & collaborators—your voice matters.
10-15 min: bit.ly/ArcSurvey2026 📝 Open all April. Opt in to win a $50 indie bookstore gift card!
#NationalPoetryMonth #CanLit
We're excited to welcome the Spring issue of Arc Poetry Magazine! In this issue you'll find the most recent Diana Brebner-winning poem and eight new pieces by Arc's 2024 – 2025 Poet-in-Residence, T. Liem. And more!
This issue of Arc Poetry is available to order from our website now: buff.ly/ZG1dQG9
Tuesday poem #681 : Sarah Wolfson @sarahwolfson.bsky.social : THE PLANTING / @greenwriterspress.bsky.social ;
dusie.blogspot.com/2026/04/tues...
Achilles Ach! Ill ease, All ails his sake, All hail his clash. Ask his likes: He lacks his lass, Alas, his law, his Clause is cause-he Slashes, slays, sacks, Classes his kills As skills: He slices clay, he Seals his lease. I call His kisses alkali, His sex, silk ashes. He's classical, his ilk: I see his case, his heel, Sick as lilies. He chases a shale sill, Hell's chilly hall— Shaky isles hazy As Hellas—keels, cauls. Ice slakes his cells. As lilacs cease, His ache heals all.
A. E. Stallings
National Poetry Month (via @chaudierebooks.bsky.social) : Nancy Huggett, / @nancyhuggett.bsky.social ;
chaudierebooks.blogspot.com/2026/04/nati...
Garden Something is growing. Plath said growing hurts at first, but when does the hurting stop?
Victoria Chang
Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel.
King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.
Storm on the Island by Seamus Heaney
"leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear."
#stormdave
National Poetry Month: Andy Weaver, / @ucalgarypress.bsky.social ;
chaudierebooks.blogspot.com/2026/04/nati...
National Poetry Month (via @chaudierebooks.bsky.social) : Melissa Powless Day, / @versefest-ottawa.bsky.social @palimpsestpress.bsky.social ;
chaudierebooks.blogspot.com/2026/04/nati...
It hefts its heavy stuff so lightly. Bravo!
For a more accessible version: https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/2026/jane-zwart/turn-yourself
With gratitude in abundance to the folks at North American Review:
Pheasantries I'm ordering the pheasant inside of the horse. One porridge before and another porridge after. I'm asking for napkins. My feet are dancing beneath the table. I'm dreaming tonight of a weeping cloud that whispers. A kidney on a plate in a feld. We would all be killed if we ever attempted to enter such a bird.
for #smallpoemsunday I'm sharing my poem in the latest issue of Fairy Tale Review
CC: @tomsnarsky.bsky.social
—just stupid answers. Like: to get to the other side. Or: because I said so. Today I asked: Why and got: It was her time. Like time was a possession she kept in her pockets, next to that note she got from Jimmy in math class and a half-opened package of strawberry gum. Another: the ringing I hear when I call her phone on days I pace through the kitchen —relentless, unchanging.
One of mine in The Offing
#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social
“There are no stupid questions”
“And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”
(Musil, The Man without Qualities)
Sanita Fejzic's photo and bio. Sanita is a queer woman with extremely short, dark hair and glasses. She's photographed in profile. Her bio is as follows: Sanita Fejzić’s first book of poetry, Refugee Mouth, was published by Frontenac House in 2025. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Fire, Room Magazine, The Antigonish Review, ellipse, and Bywords, and shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Sanita lives with her wife and children on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg (Ottawa).
Olivia Tapiero's photo and bio. Olivia is a woman with long dark hair, wearing a trench coat. Her bio is as follows: Olivia Tapiero (1990) is a writer, translator and musician, born in Montreal. She has authored several books, including Les murs (2008), Phototaxis (2017/2021), Nothing at All(2021/2026), and Un carré de poussière (2025). Her work has been awarded the Robert-Cliche Prize and the Spirale Eva-le-Grand Prize, and has been shortlisted for awards such as the Lambda Literary Awards, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Governor General’s Literary Award. The editor-in-chief of the Quebec creative writing review Moebius, she regularly contributes to national and international publications. She has translated authors such as Anne Boyer, Roxane Gay and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Her performance and musical work, in collaboration with choreographer and composer Charlie Khalil Prince, has been presented at the Festival TransAmériques in 2025. She lives in Marseille.
Le phot et biographie de Marie-Celie Agnant, une femme Ayisyen avec de longs cheveux noirs. Elle port un veste jaune. Sa biographie suit: Marie-Célie Agnant (née à Port-au-Prince, Haïti en 1953) est une auteure qui vit au Québec, Canada, depuis 1970. Agnant est une écrivaine de poèmes, romans et nouvelles, et elle a également publié des livres pour enfants. Elle est aussi conteuse et se produit occasionnellement avec le Bread & Puppet Theater du Vermont. Ses œuvres ont été traduites en espagnol, anglais, néerlandais, italien, catalan et coréen. Parmi ses livres figurent Le Silence comme le sang (1997), qui a été nominé pour le Prix du Gouverneur général en 1998, et La Dot de Sara.
A QR Code inviting you to check out the VERSeFest lineup and get tickets to all our shows. VERSeFest international poetry festival runs March 24-30.
Join us on Tuesday, March 24 for VERSeFest x Riverbed Reading Series at 7:00pm at Club SAW.
Tickets here:
www.verseottawa.ca/en/events?da...
Great to see Anna Veprinska on this list. Look for new work from Anna this summer in our Disability: The Revolution! Special Issue.
La cirque, c'est moi.
It came. It’s beautiful🥹. My deepest thanks to @pinholepoetry.bsky.social
Order here: pinholepoetry.ca/shoppoetry/
Love the changes of register: cavalcade / solemnity / shitty
Crannóg 20 SAY WHEN PHILLIP CRYMBLE "Had a life-affirming talk with the garbage man today, he said believe in me, I take the trash away". Jim Guthrie — from Save It Cool outside this morning after several days of early spring. The daffodils and crocuses in flower — a dampness in the air from last night's rain. What sounds at first like thunder in the distance turns out to be a cavalcade of trucks. A crew delivering trash cans through the neighbourhood — our households brought together in a contract, bound in kind to join a common trust. Solemnity: a word tied up with suffering and love. The newly grieving widow in a movie — her good shoes thick with mud. It also means to validate by law. This shitty world. Each public glad-hand an indenture. Pretty flowers aren't enough.
Another poem featuring crocuses as it first appeared in Crannóg
🖊✨Call for Papers! We are now accepting papers between 7,000-8,000 words (in either English or French) for a forthcoming special issue, "From One Solitude to Another: Dialogues around Québécois Literature, Indigenous Literatures, and CanLit," guest-edited by Marie-Andrée Bergeron and Sarah Krotz.
Bobby Sands for Robert Weaver I did not cry for Bobby Sands, but I almost did, thinking of my grandmother whom I loved, and who loved me, and of how her voice would break when she told me again how her grandmother died in a field in County Wexford with green stains on her lips, her hands filled with grass, and of how in that same year the English wagonso escorted by English troops carried Irish grain down to English vessels for shipment to England. Yes, yes, that was a long, long time ago; but somebody should remember Mary Foley, somebody should weep for her, even if it is only a drunken listener to lying ballads. Being human, we each of us can bear no more than a particle of pain that is not our own; the rest is rhetoric. Better to shed a tear for Mary Foley than to rant or babble about suffering that is beyond our capacity to comprehend. And what of Bobby Sands? We talk too much, all of us. In common decency, don't speak of him unless you have gone at least a day without food, and be sure you understand that he loved being alive, the same as you. Then say what you like. Call him a fool. Call him a criminal. You'll get no argument from me. I'll agree with everything you say in dispraise of gunmen. Oh, but Mary Foley's ghost was left in my keeping. I know in my heart that if he had come to me for a place to hide I could never have shut him out.
Alden Nowlan
In a 1947 letter after a visit to Paris, Clarice Lispector recounts a piece of literary gossip: that Proust’s Albertine was based on a man named Albert who had worked at the Ritz and was said to run a restaurant. 🙃
(a small glimpse of how Proust circulated in literary talk at the time)
Lebanese health officials say that 31 health workers have been killed by Israeli strikes. Israel claimed, without evidence, that Hezbollah has been using ambulances and medical facilities.
It’s the Gaza playbook all over again.
Gift link:
Don't miss today's conversation with poet Joan Naviyuk Kane about her latest collection "with snow pouring southward past the window"
Audio📻❄️: milkweed.org/between-the-...
@upittpress.bsky.social @naviyuk.bsky.social @milkweededitions.bsky.social @guggfellows.bsky.social
A Pinhole Poetry CHAPBOOK LAUNCH
Yvette LeClair will read from her new chapbook A GIRL SO EASILY
at Hair of the Dog, 2nd floor
425 Church St, Toronto, ON
APRIL 19, 2026 2 PM
with special guests Julie Cameron Gray
& R. Kolewe
Copies will be for sale at the event
