Liz Howard
The sky was never my court date.

If I died once. If I left the body.

Habeas corpus.

This is not my grave.

The value in a dead woman

is that she cannot be killed

again or cross-examined.

The value in being the dead

woman at trial is the Crown

doesn't represent you

regardless.

The value in being

dead is that it's impolite

to speak ill

of you.

What is called

wellness,

victim-witness?

A swab taken

of every orifice.

Were there any

identifying marks?

Were you in fact

on the moon

that night,

Miss Howard?

Did you make a choice?

I made a cut—it released something.

I broke the line.
from the book LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS / McClelland & Stewart
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This is a poem about trading your life to keep living. A poem about living, regardless. A poem about taking comfort in how a lake reflects the sky. The double bind of what it is to testify. A poem about refusing the hook that finds you. A poem about breaking the line that might have found you caught.
Color headshot of a smiling Joanna Lilley
Yukon Poet Wins National Canadian Book Award

Joanna Lilley has won the Canadian Authors Association Fred Kerner Book Award for the best book published in 2020.  The judges called her collection, Endings, a "rich collection of lyrical and devastating poems," as well as a "remarkable yet sad tribute to all the species and sub-species we have lost."

via CBC
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Cover of S*an D. Henry-Smith’s book, Wild Peach
What Sparks Poetry:
J. Michael Martinez on S*an D. Henry-Smith’s Wild Peach

"The alliterative recursiveness whirls me in such succulent oceans. In my mind, each time I reread 'running around & away,' it’s as if the vibrant emotional urgency of a Twombly were rendered with the precision of a Seurat, an emotional pointillism blurring me into its renderings."
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