Celebrating National Poetry Month

For more than two decades, April has been designated in Canada as National Poetry Month. At Canthius, poetry is not a 30-day affair, but rather a way of life. It is a way of understanding our world and our roles in it. It is a vehicle through which we drive through memories, instances, and futures. With musical language, sharp imagery, and vulnerability, we use poetry to open not only ourselves a little further but also our readers.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, members of the Canthius collective provided some of their favourite poems, either their all-time ones or a few that they’re simply enjoying at the moment. We hope you use our reading list as a springboard to discovering new poets and enjoying the magic of poetry all year round.

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Jane Shi, Board of Directors

Picks: "This Is What Makes Us Worlds" by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza and “fat girl tweets about pussy” by Nisha Patel (published in Coconut)

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Photo Credit: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Nisha Patel

Photo Credit: Matthew James Weigel

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's "This Is What Makes Us Worlds" makes me sob and sob. This poem reminds me that poets are astronomers, physicists, and magicians all at once: "Like light / but in reverse we billow." There's a tremendous, ambitious distance between the words "My hair loses its atoms" and what we might imagine that to be (is hair falling naturally across a lifetime? Is the body suddenly disintegrating in a cosmological event? Is changing physics what's necessary for social transformation?) but the momentum the poem builds makes such possibilities wondrous, freeing to behold. Rearranging parts—at once holy, sexy, cosmic, transformative—makes violence obsolete. "Our love eats / the deadly sounds": Espinoza's speaker asks physics, astronomy, and theology to account for the poem's tremendous queer love, and it makes me want it too.

Nisha Patel’s “fat girl tweets about pussy”—the opening poem of her debut collection Coconut—stuns the reader into forgetting there ever was a clichéd, terfy version of pussy poetry and pussy art. Shining a stained-glass mirror on the hypersexualization and desexualization of fat brown girls alike, the speaker insists on loudly loving her own body with the fury of a Twitter callout and the precision of origami. There’s a playful, fearless swagger to this reclamation that asks us to question our notion of hyperbolic:  “fat girl tweets about pussy, and it exceeds the word limit / has too much character, too few flaws, could start a religion.” Most powerful of all is this moment in the poem I want to savour and live in forever: “this time, when she says no, you will hear it and listen / this time, you will understand that the universe makes mistakes / and they sound exactly like your name.” Patel wows with the versatility of slam verse as page poetry, wrapping tenderness and fervour with sharp critiques of climate catastrophe, white supremacy, colonialism, sexual violence, and fatphobia all at once. 

Manahil Bandukwala, Digital Content Editor

Pick: “One More Love Poem” by Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail

Photo Credit: Nina Subin

In lieu of picking a "favourite" poem, I'm sharing one that has been sticking with me this National Poetry Month. I love Dunya Mikhail's lines: "I’ll count all my days, / even the nine months of days / before I was born, to say / this exponential, growing ‘I love you’" and how she expresses love as ever-growing.

Puneet Dutt, Board of Directors

Pick: “601 Christie Street” by Kristen Smith (published in Canthius 01)

“601 Christie Street” by Kristen Smith holds a special place in my heart because back then, it was just the three of us [Puneet Dutt, Claire Farley and Cira Nickel] working alone at this magazine, and we published only what we truly loved. It evokes a nostalgia for a lost childhood with sharp images like “pigeons fried to concrete” and the sound and musicality of it are haunting, especially in the pacing of the last lines.

Olive Andrews, Intern

Pick: “this accident of being lost" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (published in This Accident of Being Lost)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Photo Credit: Nadya Kwandibens

"this accident of being lost" reads like a to-do list for finding peace: "listen for the hesitant beat / sit at the edge of the woods." Simpson's writing and song have brought me a lot of comfort over the years, and particularly through rough times.

Shery Alexander Heinis, Board of Directors

Pick: “nimihtātēn – I grieve” by Louise Bernice Halfe, Canada’s new Parliamentarian Poet Laureate (published in Burning in This Midnight Dream)

Louise Bernice Halfe

Photo Credit: Writers’ Trust of Canada

My skin has been peeled off me: I am dripping in blood, awash in tears, shivering in the cold light of revelations and hard truths. I reach out my hand in the shared agony of history, in love and understanding. This is how I emerge from this profound, painful, and powerful poem.

Rebecca Mangra, Communications Coordinator

Picks: “Want Could Kill Me” by Xandria Phillips and “The Raincoat” by Ada Limón

Xandria Phillips

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

I decided to break my picks down to a poem that I recently found that keeps coming back to me (a sign of a tantalizing poem) and another from one of my all-time favourite poets.

“Want Could Kill Me” by Xandria Phillips is the first time I’ve seen a love poem with such grit and glamour. Lines like “all your haters’ teeth / strung up like pearls” are bold and original, while lines like “but my pockets / are filled with / lint and love alone / touch these inanimate gods / to my eyelids / when you kiss me” are soft and vulnerable. The way these different emotional spheres are brought together in one poem makes it a thrill to read.

Ada Limón

Photo Credit: Lucas Marquardt

I read The Carrying by Ada Limón a few years ago and instantly fell in love with her simple, tactile writing that was full of unapologetic beauty. “The Raincoat” follows a daughter’s memory of her mother. It speaks to me because I’ve been quarantining with my parents during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while they have drove me crazy on multiple occasions, the poem reminds me that a day waits for me in the future when I will have no one to protect me from the rain but myself. As a child of immigrants, I think there is always this dense love associated with our parents, one filled with burden but also possibility: we are always arms out across oceans and time, trying to find each other in the whirlpools.

Kate Foster, Board of Directors

Pick: Woman Talking Woman by Maxine Tynes

Maxine Tynes

Photo Credit: Albert Lee

Maxine Tynes is one of my favourite poets. From Dartmouth, Nova Scotia—where I also live—Tynes’ life and work showed me it was possible to be a Black woman writer. Her poems are modern and wise and feel just as important today as when they were first published in the late 80s and early 90s. Over the years, I have returned to Tynes’ words—for insight, joy and to learn. Recently, “Black Song Nova Scotia,” and other poems in her collection Woman Talking Woman provided ancestral inspiration for a short story I wrote about a historic Black community in Dartmouth.

“Without you,

without your black punctuation

the sky, the trees have no endpoint.”

- “Silent Crows” in Woman Talking Woman (1990)