Maureen N. McLane

Some people​ convert to Catholicism to answer their doubt, others to give their doubt shelter. Fanny Howe belonged to the latter party. ‘Did I have faith or was it hype,’ she asks in one poem. And later: ‘Did I believe or was it hope.’ Even within the idiosyncratic terms of her faith she was a refusenik: ‘I am secular. I walk the streets./I feel sorry for...

door in the cloudsor was it a holesmall bird on the scotch pine’s branchnorth wind, thunder

a raspberry summerthe thrushes are backthe flooded cityawash in insurerswho’s getting fucked

governor on the radiocardinal in the pinethe hummingbird returnedbut the blossoms were largely gone

I said hummingbirdand he appearedbut no it was another birdlarger and less flamboyant

what torpor...

a dead queen a red kingan orange polis crashwhere is the high styleo poet the republic requires& where the Polish heroes& can the heroic be generalcommunal asks the engorgedpopulace we we we wewe don’t need another herodischarge justice charge the worlda place making

                     *

disenthrone the reigning Xsuffer the...

Late​ in Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the unnamed protagonist goes to Montevideo to participate in a ‘panel discussion about violent scenes from movies’. She had hesitated to accept the invitation:

I avoid as much as possible celluloid depictions of violent behaviour for the reason that it unnerves and depresses me gravely to be confronted by the...

morning mist and cloudfaint on the mountaina god is moving his faceover the waters a godin the cleft in the pass up theghyll the scramblers maketheir way also up –yesterday     ||     in the beginningthey told a story about glaciers& granite and later glassand grottos and gone nowthe volcanic surge coringthe apple the earthyou are finding a way by...