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Gavin Barrett’s poetry collection Understan takes the reader on a beautiful kaleidoscopic journey from Goa, India, throughout the various places he has lived, including Toronto and environs. The poems sojourn with his enduring love for his wife and his love for humanity. The poems in this multifaceted collection celebrate and satirize through lush description. Understan manifests Barrett’s multiple influences from T.S. Eliot to Arun Kolatkar in poems inspired by family, faith (Catholicism), racism, and social injustice. Barrett is the founder and co-curator of the east-end Toronto-based...

Durs Grünbein’s The Bars of Atlantis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 Despite its brief history, East Germany held potent sway over the Western imagination Despite its brief history, East Germany held potent sway over the Western imagination; “athletes, spies and writers were three things they seemed worryingly good at producing” as Michael Hofmann put it. Escape artists also belong on that list. Thanks to the steady stream of emigration, the GDR had lost over three million citizens by 1991. In retaliation, the Eastern authorities radically altered their half of Berlin until it was virt...

In anticipation of the release of our Spring 2021 issue, “The Polymorphous per Verse Issue”—an issue dedicated to writing by trans, Two-Spirit, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people—we are reprinting guest editor Ali Blythe’s essay, “Fierce Inventory.” This essay first appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine 85, our Winter 2018 issue.   Children’s Prison Shower Don’t tell me how it ends. The one about the boy who says everything twice and is therefore sent to children’s prison. Especially don’t tell me he eventually stops saying everything twice because of good adult ...

Print Richard Thompson has played an average of about 100 live shows a year since he was 17. “That’s a lot of notes,” jokes the singer-songwriter, who just turned 72. But for the past 12 months, since the pandemic grounded the live-music business, one of the greatest guitar players and songwriters alive had to find something else to do with his hands. He wrote a book. The new “Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975” is a memoir covering eight years in Thompson’s life, from the beginning of his career in 1967 through his co-founding of the landmark British folk-rock...

It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant and Evie Christie’s Mere Extinction are the latest contributions to a genre I’m calling GTA pastoral. Each offers lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, “bare-knuckled bankers of King Street” and “meat-eating Annex Vegans” alongside nostalgia for a suburban past, filtered through a 21st-century middle-class outlook, in which as Winger puts it, “We can’t really move back / to the last subway station, can we?” Both collections demonstrate the enduring tenacity of the free-verse lyric as the default po...