Parting Words: A New Poetry Review Jeremy Audet

What is lost in movement? What do we leave behind when we move from place to place and how do we reconstitute what was lost? And what creates a place, anyways?

These are all questions Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin asks throughout her poetry, questions that lead her to complex revelations on memory, home, and time.

Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin (she/her) is a poet and writer of Chinese-Mauritian descent. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Walrus, Brick Literary Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Poetry Editor at Plenitude Magazine, and her debut poetry collection, Fire Cider Rain, is forthcoming with Coach House Books in Fall 2022. She is currently a graduate student in environmental chemistry at the University of Ottawa, where she works with various projects on the effects of environmental pollutants on living systems & communities.

For this episode, Ng Cheng Hin will be reading three of her recently published poems, "The Lighthouse Keepers of Pointe Aux Sables," which first appeared in Grain volume 49.2, and "Lessons in Southern Water Cycles" and "Circadian Rain," both of which appeared in The Malahat Review number 214.

While Ng Cheng Hin reads, I would urge you listener to focus on the subtle rhythmic patterns that shape her poems, the repetition of themes and images that give the poems – individually and as a collective – a heartbeat, a resonance. Try and locate how the speaker moves freely between place and memory, now and the past, almost as if floating through water and time.

Parting Words is a response to some of the many emerging poetic voices in Canada, and in this series we will highlight poets who, through their words, are contributing in one way or another to the myriad literary movements of the present, and whose works are achievements in and of themselves. In this podcast you will hear poems read by the poets who wrote them, the poets themselves speak about and to those poems, and critical approaches to their writing. Episodes are released every two months or so, so stay tuned for the next episodes of Parting Words: A New Poetry Review.

Ennie Gloom (she/her) is a poet and a Scorpio currently living on the unceded land of Tiohti:áke (Montreal). She often asks herself the question as to if she is a writer or a woman scorned, considering the themes of her poems: a surrealistic take on girlhood, memory, heartbreak, and the occasional discussion of sardines. Ennie is currently pursuing a Bachelor's Degree at Concordia University in English Literature and Creative Writing with a minor in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality. She is currently the poetry editor at Yolk Literary, and previously served as the Editing Manager for Creative at Graphite Publications. Lately, Ennie has been curious as to what makes a classic a classic.

In this episode of Parting Words, we decipher three of Gloom's poems, "Sardine Man," "Sirens," and "Of Course I Loved You, I Spent an Hour Talking About Your Hands" using feminist theory, literary cubism, and the intricacies of the human body.

Gloom's poems are intimate observations on femininity and the questions of growing up as a young woman. The poetry is straightforward and beautiful, at times visually striking enough to make one re-read a line a few times. The themes and ideas are contemporary and genuine; Gloom asks significant questions without raising too many eyebrows, and that’s perhaps her best poetic quality.

Her poetry consists of honest articulations on girlhood that rest on the heart of female experience. These are sincere poems written with a unique voice and powerful images, with Gloom not quite screaming in defiance of patriarchal culture, but quietly portraying its effects and, like her characters who are deboned, debrained, and killed, disembodying its narratives.

The poetics of today are complex, uncountably diverse, and expansive, even for a singular space. In Canada, and in most of the Western World, this might mirror the demographic of writers. We have rhetorically detached from the white male literary canon in the past century or so, and this has triggered an explosion of poetry from new, diverse voices. The result? Better and novel writing. Writing that addresses all centres, writing that is not collapsed under the immense weight of traditions, writing that contains but also liberates the multitudes in existence.

Parting Words is a response to some of the many emerging poetic voices in Canada, and in this series we will highlight poets who, through their words, are contributing in one way or another to the myriad literary movements of the present, and whose works are achievements in and of themselves. In this podcast you will hear poems read by the poets who wrote them, the poets themselves speak about and to those poems, and critical approaches to their writing.

The purpose of this podcast will be to call attention to poetry that is particularly good, new and alive, poetry that strives for a centrepoint between beauty and content, poetry that searches for momentum and mass, shape and direction. For us, form, voice, and language are all important, but secondary.

We hope you’ll enjoy Parting Words as an exercise in anatomy, a surgical conversation surrounding new Canadian poetry, a worship of the small and the big.