The Malahat Review #198
Author: The Malahat Review
Date: 2017-04-28T07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: epub
Description: Essential poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction

Contents

1. Malahat Review 198 front cover
2. Malahat Review 198 inside title
3. Malahat Review 198 colophon
4. Malahat Review 198 table of contents
5. Bren Simmers
6. Susan Haldane
7. Latoya Watkins
8. Inside this issue
9. Malahat Review 198 back cover

CONTENTS

Winners: Open Season Awards

matthew hollett | 11 | Kiki, Out of Focus
genevieve lehr | 16 | two tarantulas appear in the doorway during a thunder storm
rebecca morris | 37 | Foreign Bodies

Poetry

bren simmers | 5 | If Spring
susan haldane | 6 | Learning to float
paddy mccallum | 9 | Two Poems
shane neilson | 16 | Two-Sided Map
emily skov-nielsen | 34 | Volta
sina queyras | 42 | Two Poems
deanna young | 46 | Like Bees
natalie rice | 48 | Whorl
hannah green | 51 | Two Poems
julie roorda | 64 | Cat's Eye
susan gillis | 65 | Forgive Me, I Thought It Was Just Wind in the Marsh Reeds
eve joseph | 66 | Four Poems
rose hunter | 70 | Puffins
heather cadsby | 72 | Dada
curtis leblanc | 78 | Two Poems
tom wayman | 80 | Leaflets
christopher levenson | 82 | At the Dentist's

Fiction

jason markowsky | 19 | The Fourth Cup
mehdi m. kashani | 53 | Dayi
bill gaston | 83 | Levitation

Creative Nonfiction

latoya watkins | 7 | A Life
christine lowther | 47 | Not a Lake
joshua levy | 73 | My Brother’s Engagement

95

Book Reviews

jacob mcarthur mooney | |
jessica michalofsky | |
dean steadman | |
heather jessup | |
trevor corkum | |
nora decter | |
rhonda mullins | |
maureen scott harris | |
madelaine metallic | |

125

Notes on Contributors

Cover

walter scott

Private Eyes,
Coloured pencils on paper
14 in. × 17 in.
Photo credit: Barb Choit. Courtesy of the artist and Macaulay & Co.

Bren Simmers

If Spring

If rollercoaster flocks of bushtits
and yellow crowned kinglets.

If insects tap morse code on glass.

If snowmelt, if flood warning.

If icebergs calve inside ribs.

If alevins hidden in river gravel,
button up their yolk sacs.

If kingfishers pluck parr marks.

If we crack our exoskeltons and emerge
with compound eyes, winged?

If we push against our limits
to redraw them. If daylight stalks
both dawn and dusk.

If daffodils shear soil crusts.

If elderberries sprout breast buds.

If seed catalogues trump
playoff ‘staches. If alder catkins
blush red. If cotton sheets,
if coatless. If we dwell again
in the conditional.

If, when.

Susan Haldane
Learning to float
Sprawled across the water column,
limbs outspread, upheld and floating like a star
fish arrayed against a liquid sky.

You can’t teach this, though you stand
forever, ripples tapping your waist,
the little girl’s skull cupped in your left
hand; your right bracing the small
of her back. Her muscles anticipate the fall
she knows will come if you
let go. Water will bear only those
who believe.

If you forget to trust,
will you too fall to earth like all those swimmers
who chose the wrong element
for their plunge? Tumbling down and down
through the refracted light?

Latoya Watkins

A Life

On his sixteenth birthday, you celebrate his continued existence with chocolate cake and anything he wants. You tell him he can have whatever he likes for the next twenty-four hours and then you hold your breath.

You and your husband talked it about the night before, right before midnight, right after another black boy was killed at the hands of the police. You hoped to each other and prayed on your knees that he wouldn’t ask for the thing that they all ask for at sixteen. You wished you hadn’t paid for driver’s education six months ago and you plotted ways to avert his attention, to show him other exciting things in life.

But over dinner, right before his favourite restaurant brought out the chocolate cake, he looked at you through his one wide eye and the other lazy one, and you thought about the day he was born, how he wouldn’t—couldn’t even open those eyes. How it took him two weeks to open them slowly and look at the world around them for the very first time. How when he did it, when you saw those moon-shaped eyes melting into his rusty-penny skin, you became like Alice Walker’s Shug Avery and said, “You sure is ugly,” and how your mother and grandmother were appalled because you were so callous, even after your first child, a daughter, had died. And even though you meant it, that he was ugliest little thing that day, on his sixteenth birthday, he’s beautiful and his eyes are smiles instead of moons and he’s asking if he can drive to school tomorrow.

And the table goes silent. You and your husband take one big breath and it seems you are together in a bubble above him, hovering, watching him try to be a boy, try to be carefree, try to be human. And you hold that breath, but somehow your husband is able to open his mouth, and you float above them, watching your man’s lips move to tell the boy that he might die. That even if he does everything right, has always done everything right, he might die. That he can put his hands up. That he can say, “Don’t shoot.” That he can say, “Please don’t shoot.” That he can tell them he’s a good boy. That his dad is a good man. That his mother has a job. That he doesn’t know what food stamps are. That he has two sisters. That he walks them to school. That he’s never smoked marijuana. That he’s never even tasted beer. That he has yet to lose his virginity. That he’s never even kissed a girl. That he cleaned his room today. That when he was eight he wanted to be a police officer. That he thought they were gods.

And you watch your man’s lips move with tears in your eyes. Your son’s smile spreads across his face and you see all that is holy spill over your child. And you hold on to that. And you hope. When your husband hands your son the keys the very next day, you hope the officer who pulls him over can see God in him, too.

Notes on Contributors

heather cadsby’s fifth book of poetry, Standing in the Flock of Connections, will be published by Brick in 2018.

trevor corkum has been nominated for the Journey Prize and won honourable mention in the National Magazine Awards. His novel, Electric Boy, is forthcoming.

nora decter is a writer from Winnipeg. Her first novel is forthcoming from Orca.

bill gaston’s “Levitation” will appear in his new collection, A Mariner’s Guide to Self-Sabotage, due out this fall. He lives in Victoria.

susan gillis’s fourth collection of poetry is forthcoming in 2018. Part of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, she is a poetry editor at Numéro Cinq.

hannah green lives in Winnipeg. Her poetry has appeared in Arc and Matrix. In 2017 she will serve as artist-in-residence in Riding Mountain National Park.

susan haldane, a writer and farmer on the edge of northern Ontario, has published in The New Quarterly, Room, and Desperately Seeking Susans.

maureen scott harris has published three books of poetry, including Slow Curve Out (2012). Her chapbook, Waters Remembered, appeared in 2016.

matthew hollett, a visual artist and writer in St. John’s, makes books and other interactive works that investigate landscape and memory through photography, writing, and walking.

rose hunter is a writer and freelance editor. Five Islands Press in Australia will publish her next book of poetry, glass, in 2017.

heather jessup teaches English literature at Langara College in Vancouver. Her first novel is The Lightning Field.

eve joseph’s two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (2010), were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. In the Slender Margin (2014) won the Hubert Evans Award.

mehdi m. kashani lives in Toronto. One of his stories in Persian won first place in the Sadeq Hedayat 12th-Annual Short Story Contest in 2014. His fiction has also appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Litro, and The Los Angeles Review.

curtis leblanc was born in St. Albert, Alberta. His poetry won the 2016 Readers’ Choice Award in Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest.

genevieve lehr, author of The Sorrowing House (2004) and Stomata (2016), and co-winner of The Malahat Review’s 2015 Long Poem Prize, lives in Halifax.

christopher levenson, Arc’s first editor, published his eleventh book of poetry, Night Vision, a Governor General’s Literary Award nominee, in 2014. A Tattered Coat upon a Stick is due out this spring.

joshua levy, a storyteller on CBC Radio and at The Raconteurs, has published in Event, Maisonneuve, and The Antigonish Review. He lives in Montreal.

christine lowther’s latest book, Born Out of This (a memoir) was shortlisted for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. She lives in Clayoquot Sound.

jason markowsky has published short fiction in The Dalhousie Review, Prairie Fire, and The Danforth Review. He is currently teaching high-school English in Peru.

paddy mccallum, author of Parable Beach (2000) and From Where the Trees are Standing in the Water (2010), lives in Gibsons, B.C.

madelaine metallic, a Mi’gmaq woman from Listuguj, Quebec, is pursuing her ma in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria.

jessica michalofsky’s fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Geist, Joyland, Brick, The Winnipeg Review, and Bookslut.

jacob mcarthur mooney published Don’t Be Interesting, a new book of poems, in 2016. He lives in Toronto.

rebecca morris (@bexmorris99) lives and writes in Montreal. She is working on a novel set in her hometown of Guelph, Ontario.

rhonda mullins won a Governor General’s Literary Award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. She lives in Montreal.

shane neilson, a writer from New Brunswick, published two books of M. Travis Lane’s work in 2016. His book, Dysphoria, is forthcoming from Porcupine’s Quill.

sina queyras is a poet and curator. She lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia. My Ariel is due out from Coach House this fall.

natalie rice completed her creative-writing degree at ubc-Okanagan. She has published in Lake: Journal of Arts and Environment and Contemporary Verse 2.

julie roorda is the author of three books poetry, a collection of short stories, and a novel for young adults. Her first novel for adults is forthcoming in 2017.

Walter Scott is a Kahnawake-born artist based in Montreal and Toronto. His work is informed by questions of representation, cultural production, and narrative construction.

bren simmers, author of two books of poetry, is the 2016-17 writer-in-residence at the Ranger Station Art Gallery in Harrison Hot Springs.

emily skov-nielsen is completing her main English and creative writing at UNB. Managing editor for Qwerty, she has published in numerous literary journals.

dean steadman lives in Ottawa. The most recent of his four books of poetry is Après Satie—Two and Four Hands (2016).

latoya watkins holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Passages North, Ruminate, and The Pushcart Prize XXXIX.

tom wayman published The Order in Which We Do Things in 2014. Thistledown will publish Helpless Angels ( poetry) in 2017.

deanna young’s third book of poetry, House Dreams (2014), was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, among other prizes. A new book is forthcoming in 2018.

GET THE MALAHAT REVIEW

In issue #198 (Spring 2017)

The Malahat Review’s current issue celebrates Open Season Award winners Genevieve Lehr (poetry), Rebecca Morris (fiction), and Matthew Hollett (creative nonfiction). Linger over Mehdi M. Kashani’s story set in Tehran, about infidelity and immigration to Vancouver; LaToya Watkins’ memoir about giving her son keys to the car in a racialized America; and Eve Joseph’s poetic take on photographer Diane Arbus. Move on to new work by Heather Cadsby, Bill Gaston, Christopher Levenson, Christine Lowther, and Sina Queyras, and by new voices Hannah Green, Joshua Levy, Jason Markowsky, and Emily Skov-Nielsen. Round off the day with reviews of current Canadian books.