Dive In | Poetry in Voice

Sometimes a Voice (1)

On a hot summer afternoon, Danny jumped off the boathouse roof without thinking of the consequences.

Qawanguq with Fox

Abigail Chabitnoy’s dreamscape of a poem depicts a coy little fox.

Vancouver Lights

This wartime poem looks out at Vancouver’s nighttime skyline and contemplates humanity.

The Potato Harvest

This lonely poem is about so much more than a bare field.

Dear Updike

Evelyn Lau powerfully describes the world around her in order to grieve the loss of a beloved writer.

I saw a perfect tree today

Lillian Allen praises the rampant diversity of trees in Northern Ontario and asks us to see perfection in difference.

But I’m No One

But I’m No one is a reflection on our tendency to fear death and the manifestation of this fear through uncanny beliefs.

The Fatigue

Fatigue is often the first sign something is wrong with one's body. Fatigue looms larger than life in this poem which grapples with meds, family, and coping.

dont worry yr hair

Having a bad day? This uplifting poem about the power of our inner potential should light a spark.

Salmon Courage

Deep bravery can emerge amid clashing familial hopes and truths. M. NourbeSe Philip shows us how.

My Poem Without Me in It

Imagining herself removed from her own poem, a poet realizes how poetry gives her the space to create herself.

The Lonely Land

In this free verse poem, snapshots of a wild landscape show that beauty and conflict are not mutually exclusive — and that one may be derived from the other.

Community Garden

Seeking to escape internet trolls the speaker turns her eye to the garden

Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen brilliantly uses rhyme and meter in this brutal poem about a poison gas attack during WWI.

The Problem With Being a Box Too Small for Its Contents

Misch expounds the unbearable work needed after a breakup: to separate from your lost love and “rejoin yourselves…even when you don’t want to.”

World Town

Layers of memory paint a moving, vibrant portrait of one man’s time spent in a seaside town with his father.

The New Experience

Join the speaker on a whirlwind journey towards a surprising realization.

Application Form

Identity is elusive. Maybe it doesn’t exist at all.

Buen Esqueleto

With its allusions and repetitions, “Buen Esqueleto” speaks powerfully on behalf of families caught in the contemporary U.S. border conflict.

The Visions of Stone Carrier

In this dreamlike piece exploring memory and primogeniture, N. Scott Momaday casts a haunting spell that transports the reader through mystery and reminiscence.

aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?

The stunningly cruel comments of an internet forum reverberate throughout a sleepless night

Weed Killer

Fiona Tinwei Lam moves from personal to universal and back to the personal in this chilling poem about the ecological destruction bequeathed from one generation to the next.

sturgeon

Intense with empathy, the poem places poet and struggling fish in direct physical relation.

I Lost My Talk

How can you speak your deepest truth in a language that doesn’t understand you?

Two Hours on the Train

In this deceptively simple poem, a poet on a journey transcends time.

From Red Doc

In this poem-as-a-conversation, a man and his mother consider how the past lives on in the present.

Echolalia

Exploring the tension between desire and satisfaction, this is “a poem that you have to kiss your way through without being kissed,” says Williams.

a good day

The poet recalls the day she heard her father would die.

Too Negative

Have your friends’ parents ever warned them away from you because they thought you were a bad influence? “Too Negative” is a poem about that experience.

I’ll Teach You Cree

By sharing with us the untranslatable aspects of Cree culture, Scofield immerses the reader with the sensorial experiences that deepen the bonds of community.

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

What would you ask a knight if you found him alone and palely loitering along a barren path?

An Innocent Little Girl

• Favzieh Rahgozar Barlas captures a snapshot of child marriage, its cultural and economic context, and its physical and emotional aftermath.

Two Words: A Wedding

bpNichol presents life as a river of ever-changing words and asks us to step in.

For My Best Friend

One way to grieve is to give tribute, perhaps even before the person you are grieving is completely gone.

A Stone Diary

A love poem to a stone takes on deeper, rockier meanings.

Tide

Both stark and tender, this poem is about Reena Virk, a BC teen of South Asian descent who was assaulted and murdered by her peers in 1997.

I Feel the Sun

This poem articulates the poet’s intense feeling about the sunlight after going through a long winter.

What Is Poetry

Using only the letters in the title’s question, Holbrook generates a smorgasbord of weird and delightful answers.

from “Road Shoulders”

the shoulder of the road gleams with the poet's attention

April 30, 2014

One spring day, dreading an afternoon appointment that will dredge up all kinds of terrible memories, the speaker of the poem focuses on the natural world around her.