POEMLINK No. 4: Hybrid Forms
Welcome to POEMLINK, a poetry roundup which promises to be a not-so-infrequent curation of pieces that have recently caught our attention in literary journals and magazines online. POEMLINK aims to provide an eclectic selection of pieces we find special, innovative, or simply amusing. Let us scour the world of internet poetry so you don’t have to.
We’re doing things a little differently with this iteration of POEMLINK by introducing Shrapnel’s new submission category, Hybrid Forms, and showcasing work that reflects it. There is a long history of writing that has defied categorization, mixed genres, or incorporated extratextual elements—from prose poetry, audiovisual poems, and electronic literature, to New Narrative, innovative writing, and nonnarrative, to documentary poetics and experimental writing.
Hybrid Forms welcomes the kinds of writing that eschew the sometimes definitive labels of fiction and poetry. If you’ve ever felt like your work exists outside of these categories, check out our submission guidelines for Hybrid Forms. We’re looking for work that is daring, takes formal and generic risks, and plays with what literary expression can look, feel, read, and sound like—on and off the page.
—PL
1. Jacquelyn Ross’s experimental fiction piece, “A Brief History of Feeling,” uses feelings from generosity and wonder to melodrama, senselessness, and optimism as prompts to navigate worlds of awe, intimacy, and expansiveness: “470 years ago—the stranger is outside the house again, this time cursing wildly about the coming end.”
2. In Cody-Rose Clevidence’s “pyramid excerpt from ((((((((XYZ)))))))),” a massive text looms with a peripatetic vigour and planetary scope. Enter into this urgent domain of poetic, critical attention: “the hummingbirds beak, the monarch’s proboscis. The generations of grass / into corn. The philosopher on the radio says that the only thing as human as humanity is / inhumanity.”
3. Anney Bolgiano’s “3 From Flat-Pack” is a visual poem in motion that combines drooping lines of verse in and alongside visuals reminiscent of instruction manual depictions. These schematics, according to Bolgiano, are “a set of impossible instructions for an impossible time.”
4. Excerpted in the second issue of a special three-part 50th anniversary series from The Capilano Review, Ryan Fitzpatrick’s “A Few Notes on Intimacy,” opens as a personal and critical exploration of physical intimacies—corporeal and architectural—as a sobering reminder of one’s constant act of relation: “Even in loneliness, I am always in relation, living in the place where the demand for tact meets the assembled eyes of surveillance.”
Prathna Lor
Prathna Lor, the poetry editor of Shrapnel, is a poet, essayist, and educator currently living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Their writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, and Canadian Literature, among other places.